⛳ NEW COURSE: TBC Raspberry Falls

The Round 31 winner is live. TBC Raspberry Falls, my version of Raspberry Falls Golf and Hunt Club in Leesburg, Virginia. This one has been sitting near the top of the nomination pool for a while, and when it finally won the round I understood why you all kept pushing it. It is a course with a real identity. Virginia's only Gary Player Signature design, laid out over Raspberry Plain, an old 18th-century plantation up in Loudoun County horse country.

The thing everybody talks about at Raspberry Falls is the bunkers, and they earned it. Scottish-style stacked-sod walls, the kind you expect to see at a links course on the other side of the ocean, sitting in the middle of the Virginia countryside. They completely change how you attack the course. A greenside miss is not just a bunker shot, it is a real problem, and off the tee those dark sod faces give every hole a look you will not mix up with anything else in the library.

The land does a lot of work here too. The routing rolls through the countryside with some legitimate elevation moves, elevated tees where the fairway falls away below you, greens benched into hillsides, and rock outcroppings and native grass framing the corridors. I spent a lot of time getting the transition areas right, the rough scrub between holes, the stone, the fence lines, because that in-between stuff is what makes it feel like northern Virginia instead of a generic parkland build.

Playing it, you get asked a little of everything. There are wide fairways that tempt you to hit driver until you notice where the sod bunkers pinch the landing zone, approach shots into greens with real movement, and a couple of stretches where you are just glad to walk away with par. It is very playable for a normal round, but if you shortside yourself in the wrong spot you will remember it. That balance is what Player built into the real one and I tried hard to keep it.

So that is TBC Raspberry Falls. Thank you to everyone who nominated it, commented on it, and voted it through in Round 31. It is live in GSPro now for Patreon members. Go play it, find the sod bunkers the hard way, and tell me what you think.

Next up: Martis Camp

And now the part I am honestly just as excited about. The Round 32 winner is Martis Camp, and it is next on the build list.

If you have not heard of it, Martis Camp is a private Tom Fazio design up in the High Sierra near Truckee, California, just above Lake Tahoe. The course sits at about 6,000 feet, and that number changes everything. The air is thin up there, the ball flies noticeably farther, and you get to make the fun kind of club decisions you never make at sea level. Fazio himself has called it as good as any course he has ever designed, which is saying something given his resume.

The front nine runs across elevated terrain with huge Sierra mountain views, then the back nine drops down to the valley floor and works along Martis Creek. The finishing stretch is one of the best closing runs anywhere: a drivable risk-reward par 4 at 16, a long par 3 at 17, and a beast of a closing hole. Mountain golf, big pines, granite, and views in every direction. It is going to be a blast to build and an even bigger blast to play.

That is what is coming next. Keep an eye on the vote page for progress, and thank you again for another great round of voting.