Shadow Mountain GC Readies New One-Acre Putting Course

(Photo by Andy Abeyta/The Desert Sun)

The new attraction will cover between 40,000 and 45,000 sq. ft. and feature “skate park”-like humps and bumps, along with a flamingo sculpted into its surface. It’s the first step in new owner Lindi Biggi’s plan to revive the Palm Desert, Calif. property. “The beauty of these putting courses is they are just built for fun,” Biggi says. “So the things you wouldn’t do on a normal golf course, you can do here.”

Jay Blasi knows there is only one reason for a one-acre putting green to exist, The Desert Sun of Palm Springs, Calif. reported.

“A putting green, a large putting green or a putting course, is a place for people to come and have fun,” Blasi, the designer behind a one-acre green that is under construction at Shadow Mountain Golf Club in Palm Desert, Calif., told The Desert Sun.

“The beauty of it is golfers from age 4 to 94 can come out, and scratch golfers and people who have never played a full round of golf can enjoy it,” Blasi added.

The one-acre putting surface is the first step, The Desert Sun reported, in new course owner Lindi Biggi’s plans to revive Shadow Mountain after several years of the course teetering on the edge of closure (https://clubandresortbusiness.com/shadow-mountain-gc-purchased-for-1-7m-with-renovations-in-mind/),

“Originally, [Shadow Mountain] was the [hottest] spot in the whole area,” Biggi said of the course she took over in August 2021, The Desert Sun reported. “It’s going to be back to that. It’s going to be an adult playground.”

What Shadow Mountain is building will be half the size, The Desert Sun reported, of what is perhaps the most famous putting course in the world: the Himalayas Course at St. Andrews in Scotland, which covers about two acres near the second tee of the famed Old Course.

But at one acre, The Desert Sun reported, Shadow Mountain’s version will still cover between 40,000 and 45,000 sq. ft., or about the size of nine or 10 of the regular greens on its full-size golf course.

“You could set this up an infinite number of ways,” Blasi told The Desert Sun. “Touchstone Golf [which is operating the course for Biggi] has operational freedom out here.

“You could put a hundred cups and let people use it as a giant putting green, or make a nine-hole putting course in which each of those holes would be 100 feet with big old wild-and-crazy slopes,” she added. “Eighteen holes, 36 holes, you can do whatever.”

The chance to build a putting course at Shadow Mountain was too good to pass up, Mark Luthman, President of Austin, Texas-based Touchstone Golf, told The Desert Sun.

“This is a unique opportunity,” Luthman said. “We have observed the success of similar greens and 18-hole putting courses. There’s a handful of them, and we thought because there is nothing like that in the desert, this is a cool, really unique opportunity to do just that.”

The desert does have nine- or 18-hole putting courses at private courses or resorts, The Desert Sun reported, but those have traditional layouts on smaller pieces of land. The Shadow Mountain course will be on a much larger scale, with the ability to change the course layout daily.

With just 60 acres for the entire course running through nearby housing, the only land available for the one-acre course was on the area of the course’s practice range, between the first and ninth holes, The Desert Sun reported. A shorter range with perhaps some nets for hitting full shots will be arranged at the south end of the new putting surface.

Still a design in progress, the new putting facility will have a traditional practice putting area at the northern end of the acre, near a pond that will be occupied by flamingos that currently live at animal-loving Biggi’s house and a small creek, The Desert Sun reported. But after that, Blasi promised, the rest of the acre will be a surface that won’t resemble other greens in the desert.

“The beauty of these putting courses is they are just built for fun,” she said. “So the things you wouldn’t do on a normal golf course—whether it is big humps and bumps, or if you were able to think about a skate park [and a] kind of a half-pipe thing, you can do here.”

Some particularly wild slopes and bumps may remind some golfers of miniature golf courses, she added.

Construction of Shadow Mountain’s new course is being done by Texas-based Greenscape Methods, The Desert Sun reported. But the project isn’t requiring much dirt to be moved.

“It’s all kind of a ‘push and place,” Greenscape’s Don Mahaffey told The Desert Sun. “When you push a green, if you do a one-foot cut and a one-foot fill, that’s two-foot elevation change, and on a putting green, that can be significant.

“So it doesn’t take a lot of massaging to make something interesting,” Mahaffey added. “The challenge when you do a green this size is that all greens have to have surface drainage. So you are still trying to create something cool that functions.”

Sculpted into the middle of the putting surface by the bulldozers will be a large profile of a flamingo, The Desert Sun reported—not only as another nod to Biggi’s love of those birds, but also as a way to create wildly sloping areas that can create pin placements that could delight—or infuriate—golfers.

The one-acre green is not being built as a traditional USGA green, The Desert Sun reported. It is being built on the surface of the land and won’t have drainage and other layers under the putting surface.

“You have native sandy soils here,” Blasi explained. “If you were to build a traditional USGA green with imported sand and a blanket of gravel and build one that is an acre in size, it would be very, very expensive and time-consuming.

“But the fact that you have the ideal soils here to begin with makes the construction of the green simpler,” she added. “You just kind of shape this and go.”

The green will be sodded with overseeded Bermuda grass from Palm Desert-based West Coast Turf, The Desert Sun reported. The course should be ready to open a few months into 2022, Blasi said, but only after the turf has had the proper time to come together and can be presented as a true putting surface.

Once the massive green does open, Biggi, Luthman and others believe the putting course will attract new clients to Shadow Mountain, The Desert Sun reported.

“We want to make the place more appealing to a wider variety of people,” Luthman said. “Families [as well as] people who might not be able to get out and play 18 anymore, [or] people who are visitors to the valley who might play 18 and then have a couple of extra hours.”

Added Mahaffey: “It’s supposed to be a place for fun. Leagues, alumni associations [and] any of the 120 golf courses in the Valley can bring their crews over here for a night of putting and drinking. It’s basically built for fun.”