71 bunker styling. New general manager Tom Feller realised the scale of the problem and effectively said to the committee: ‘Engage a golf architect for a masterplan or you will need to find someone else to do my job’. Supported by a small group of activist members, he drove the recruitment of veteran architect Ron Prichard, who, using his decades of experience on Ross courses, devised a restoration plan, which was implemented in 2015. That project was rapturously received, but Prichard now admits that he was, to an extent, flying by the seat of his pants. “We really had no clear understanding of how Ross bunkered this golf course,” he says. “No drawings. No photography. The 2015 plan was me using considerable experience of studying Ross’s drawings and restoring several dozens of other Ross courses – I bunkered the course on the 1915 plans and on the ground based primarily on instinct.” And then, on 10 August 2020, everything changed. A derecho, a straight-line windstorm of similar force to a hurricane, developed in the Midwest over South Dakota. By late morning, the storm had reached its peak strength and moved into the Cedar Rapids area, passing through the city with gusts of 130-140 miles per hour. It left 1.9 million people in the region without power, and it caused the Duane Arnold Energy Center, Iowa’s only nuclear power plant, to be shut down permanently (it was scheduled to be decommissioned later that year and restarting it for a few months was judged to be uneconomic). And it effectively destroyed the Cedar Rapids golf course, felling about 700 mature specimen trees, mostly oak and sycamore (thousands of smaller trees also went). For months afterwards, the course resembled a logging camp, as crews struggled to remove all the fallen trees. General manager Tom Feller was at the golf course when the balloon went up. “We had a large golf outing that day, so I was helping close down the beverage station on the sixth hole before the storm hit,” he says. “As I dropped off the bartender at the clubhouse, I went to park my truck in the parking lot and got stuck in the storm. It lasted roughly 40 minutes, then I ran to the clubhouse immediately after. I raced out of my truck, and my initial response was, ‘Oh my God, what just happened? I hope everyone is safe.’ As I walked out of the back of the clubhouse to look out over the golf course, I was lost for words. It was a disaster.” Architect Prichard returned to Iowa three weeks after the derecho. He was initially despondent. “I was absolutely speechless when I saw the golf course,” he says. “The damage was far more substantial than I had anticipated. And in addition to the winds knocking down what appeared to me to be 90 per cent of the once-standing trees, every tree that still stood had massive damage to its remaining limbs and branches. I was so overcome that I could not initially imagine a solution. But during the next day or two I began to piece together what I felt was a proper approach and felt prepared to return to my drawing table and develop a plan.” The principal element of Prichard’s plan – which, though it respected Ross’s original design, was not largely restorative – was to rebuild the CEDAR RAPIDS “ As I walked out of the back of the clubhouse to look out over the golf course, I was lost for words. It was a disaster” After the storm, bunkering appeared out of scale with the newly open landscape of the course Photo: Vaughn Halyard
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