82 REPORT In an era of big budget renovations and high-priced member assessments to pay for them, Bend Golf Club in central Oregon did it the old-fashioned way: modestly, efficiently and on time. The club has undertaken a complete bunker renovation for all of $550,000. That includes construction costs, material and design fees. The work shut down no more than half the course at any one time and cost members a whopping assessment of $810 each. That covered just over half the total cost of the programme; the remaining $250,000 came out of capital reserves. No debt was incurred. Welcome to the world of parsimony. Bend GC dates to a 1925 design attributed to H. Chandler Egan. The provenance is questionable, since there is no record of Egan’s work or presence on site – a gap in the annals compounded by a clubhouse move in the late 1960s that did not seem to include club records. A simplistic layout map of the inaugural eighteenhole layout bears the names of local civil engineer C.M. Redfield and that of a golf professional from Waverley Country Club in Portland, Bill Hanley. Nine holes of that original plan were quickly abandoned after opening, leaving only the current back nine in place. A second nine, comprising holes one to nine, was designed by the father/ son team of Robert Earl and Robert Lee Baldock and opened in 1971. The course, but not the routing, was subsequently redesigned in 1992 by Bill Robinson, who installed his trademark symmetrical mounding along with extensive behind-the-green bunkering. The course sits 162 miles southeast of downtown Portland. It sports the characteristic landforms and ponderosa pines/sagebrush flora of central Oregon’s arid, high desert plain, 3,755 feet above sea level, just on the eastern downslope of the Cascade Range. The latest bunker work, done between mid-March and late June 2023, is the product of Pacific Northwest course designer Dan Hixson. His original works include Bandon Crossing and Silvies Valley Ranch in Oregon and Wine Valley CC in Washington. He has also undertaken renovation work throughout the region, including several Bunker renovation the smart way Photo: Bend Media Brad Klein reports on Dan Hixson’s carefully budgeted work at Bend GC in Oregon. Tree removal had already opened up the Bend site and brought back views across the course
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