Ballyneal: An oasis on the high plains

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(CNN) -- When you walk off the 18th green at the Ballyneal Golf and Hunt Club, the vistas of rambling sand dunes, yucca plants and tumbleweed pressed against a vivid, blue northeastern Colorado sky, recall lyrics from a recently released jazz tune.

The song talks of life's many "overrated pleasures and underrated treasures." Opened in 2006, the Ballyneal links style course, outside Holyoke, Colorado, a small town tucked into the high plains desert, is truly a hidden treasure.

Expected by some golf critics to be recognized as one of the world's top courses in the next few years, Ballyneal was an idea hatched by two local brothers who grew up on a corn farm near the current site of the private golf club.

In 1979, one of the brothers, Jim O'Neal, then in high school, suggested that a stretch of sand dunes nearby would make a perfect golf course.

He thought that what the locals called the "chop hills" -- an area more akin to the austere prairies of Nebraska and Kansas than the majestic Rockies to the West -- offered terrain similar to the links courses that the great tournaments in the British Isles were played on.

At first, Jim's older brother, Rupert, thought the idea was a bit fanciful. Even if one could build a great course on the high plains -- flyover country to most of America -- who would come?

But years later, after Jim had followed his interests to California, where he became a golf pro, Rupert remembered their conversation.

After another course was built on similar land in an even more isolated area in Nebraska, Rupert and his brother purchased the rights to 700 acres not far from their farm.

In 2002, the brothers invited acclaimed golf architect Tom Doak to come for a visit and walk the Dunes. When Doak saw the chop hills, he agreed the area might lend itself to a golf course.

What emerged was a 7,130-yard, par-71 course built into the contours of the natural environment.

Deep, narrow bunkers are carved into the dunes. Yucca plants, sagebrush and flowering cactuses -- even the occasional spotted yellow bull snake -- protect the fescue, bent and bluegrass fairways and greens.

There are no markers on the tee boxes. Indeed, the only man-made objects on the course are the flagsticks and a few railroad planks that serve as stairs between a couple of the elevated holes.

Instead of golf carts, eagle-eyed caddies carry clubs and can spot a ball given up for lost in a yucca plant from 140 yards.

The Ballyneal course is one of three so-called "retreat" golf clubs to open in the past 12 years in the Nebraska-Colorado region, an area some predict will become a hot destination for avid golfers.

The first two are nearby one another in Mullen, Nebraska. Initially, the Sand Hills Club opened in 1995. It was followed by the Dismal River Club last year. Sand Hills was designed by a team that included Masters champion Ben Crenshaw, and Dismal River's design team was led by golf great Jack Nicklaus.

"It's so stark, it's beautiful,'' Nicklaus told The Associated Press."If you're not a golfer, then you think there's nothing there. If you are a golfer, you look at the way the land rolls, you picture the grass and high fescues, and you say, 'Man, this is neat.' ''

Along with Ballyneal, these courses were built, in part, as a reaction to the trend of cookie-cutter tracks that grew across America in the 1970s and 1980s, a traditionalist's answer to golf's equivalent of the shopping mall or mega-store.

Known in golf circles as the "minimalist movement," Doak describes the philosophy behind this school of architecture as trying to make a golf course emerge from the land with as little intervention by machine or man as possible.

"Instead of reshaping a severe slope, we try to figure out how to use it to make a golf hole interesting," Doak explains on his Web site. "The bulldozer is our third and last option."

The goal, Doak continues, is to create a course that looks as if it was not designed at all, but rather emerged from the landscape.

The eighth and 17th holes are typical of the natural setting at Ballyneal. Standing on the tee or looking back after completing the par-5 eighth or par-4 17th, one is greeted with 360-degree views previously reserved for the native meadow lark, enterprising wildcatter or wandering cowboy of American lore.

While it is difficult to select one signature hole at Ballyneal, it is not a stretch to recognize that almost any one of the 18 would be a highlight on most courses.

Marked by magnificent vistas, complex fairways, banked greens and a pleasant route, Ballyneal is fast being recognized as one of Doak's -- and American golf's -- new masterpieces.

The Ballyneal Golf and Hunt Club aims to create an atmosphere best characterized as a practiced lack of pretense.

This style is evident in the clubhouse, where the ball marks, for example, are a cup of pennies set out next to the tees and scorecards.

The menu at the restaurant -- highlighted by an array of seafood, steaks and pasta -- features high-end dining in a relaxed room in which guests can show up for dinner in jeans, shorts and jogging shoes. And the Ballyneal lodge, which offers comfortable, tastefully decorated rooms, is done with natural stone fireplaces, leather chairs, dark wood and flagstone patio tiles that place comfort on par with appearances.

The drive in to Ballyneal is a dusty and bug-splattered ride 2 ½ hours northeast of the Denver airport. The drive passes through miles of flat farmland filled with horses, cattle, sugar beet, millet and corn fields. Then, it turns onto dirt back roads that wind along barbed wire fences, past iron horses pumping up oil, and tall, wide aluminum grain silos. A quick right turn and the club appears just over a hill.

One of the benefits of the drive is that, as the population recedes (Holyoke has about 2,300 residents, most of whom work in agriculture), Blackberries, cell phones and other symptoms of the ailments of middle age fade into relative irrelevance. The stark, natural landscape and a little Willie Nelson or George Benson on the CD player seem to release the tension of the workaday world into the dry, gusting winds.

Today, the Ballyneal golf club experience (like that at Sand Hills and Dismal River) is largely available only to the well-heeled or well-connected. Ballyneal is restricted to members and guests. But the O'Neal brothers hope to change that, soon, and expose the charms and challenges of links golf to others by building a public course.

While the public links -- which they intend to call Grateful Dunes -- will likely have a few cart paths, the brothers want it to retain the deep, blowout bunkers and the natural feel and contours of the private course. They have started planning the public course on land near the current facility, and hope to open it in the next few years.

"We are excited about that," Rupert O'Neal said one evening, sitting with friends, family and club members at the restaurant at Ballyneal. "We want to be able to offer this type of golf to more people and we want to create more jobs in the community."

If so, the public course could extend the lure of golf in what remains a largely remote part of the country. For now, Ballyneal sits as an oasis on the high plains.

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The Ballyneal links style course is outside Holyoke, Colorado, a small town tucked into the high plains desert.

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Ballyneal: An oasis on the high plains

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