⛳ NEW COURSE: TBC Truckee

The Round 32 winner is live. TBC Truckee is my take on Martis Camp, the private Tom Fazio course sitting in the Martis Valley between Truckee and Northstar, just up the hill from Lake Tahoe. I have been looking forward to this one since the round closed, and I am going to say it plainly: I think it is one of the best things I have built.

I pulled out all the stops on this one. Every trick I have picked up over the last couple of years went into it.

The land does most of the talking

Martis Camp sits at right around 6,000 feet, and mountain golf at that elevation has a feel you cannot fake. Thin air, so the ball goes. Big firs standing in tight clusters that frame a hole and then open up on you. I did my best to get those trees right, they are a huge part of how the place reads. Granite pushing up out of the ground. Rocky native waste that starts about a foot past the fairway edge and does not forgive much.

Fazio gave it wide corridors, which sounds generous until you are standing on the tee looking through a gap in the trees at a fairway that tilts away from you. The width is there so you have options, not so you can turn your brain off. I spent a lot of time on the transitions between mown grass and native, because that boundary is the whole character of the place. Get it wrong and it looks like a green carpet in a forest. Get it right and it looks like somebody cleared exactly enough trees to make golf possible and left the rest of the Sierra alone.

The overhead imagery fought me

Full honesty on this one. The available overhead imagery for Martis Camp is rough. It is a private club in the mountains, tree canopy covers a lot of the ground, and the shadows do not do you any favors when you are trying to read a bunker edge or a green surround.

So a lot of this build came from cross-referencing everything I could get my hands on: ground-level photos, flyover footage, member videos, tour broadcasts, anything that showed me a green complex from a real angle. Where the overhead went dark under the trees I built it the way the shot demanded, based on what the routing and the surrounding terrain were telling me. Is every square foot exact? No, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the golf holes are right, the shot values are right, and it feels like the place.

The clubhouse

This is the part I am proudest of. Martis Camp's clubhouse sits up on a rock outcrop above the golf course, and it is one of the most recognizable buildings in mountain golf. Stone base, timber, big green roof lines, the whole lodge look.

There was no way to do this course justice with a generic building dropped in, so the course includes a custom replica of it. It sits where it should sit, at the scale it should sit, and when you play up toward it on the closing stretch you get the same view you would get standing there in person. That single detail took a big chunk of the build time and it was worth every bit of it.

A note on performance

There are a lot of details in this course. Custom clubhouse, dense tree work, rock, native scrub, the stuff that makes it feel real. All of that costs something in a sim, and performance is always a balance against how good a course looks.

I have tested it and I think it runs well. But rigs vary, and I would rather hear about it than not. If you run into any issues, performance or otherwise, please let me know. Frame drops, a spot that looks wrong, a green that plays weird, a tree in a place a tree should not be, anything. Message me on Patreon, comment on the post, or use the contact form on the site. I fix things, and I would much rather ship an update than have people quietly not enjoy a course I put this much into.

Go play it

TBC Truckee is live in GSPro now for Patreon members. Take an extra look at your yardages, the altitude is real. Play a little more aggressively than you normally would off the tee and see if the width bails you out or gets you into the rocks.

Thank you to everyone who nominated Martis Camp, voted for it, and then waited while I chased down reference photos of a course almost nobody gets to see. Round 32 was a good one.

Next up: Old White

The Round 33 winner is Old White at The Greenbrier, and this one is a completely different animal.

Old White TPC in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, is a C.B. Macdonald design from 1914, which makes it one of the oldest and most important courses I have ever attempted. It is a template course, so you get the classic Macdonald and Raynor holes: Redan, Biarritz, Alps, Punchbowl, Eden. Square-ish greens, sharp bunker edges, big bold shapes on the ground. If Truckee was about trees and rock, Old White is about geometry and angles.

Best part: LiDAR has been found for it. That is a huge deal. It means the ground under this build will be measured elevation data instead of my best read of a satellite photo, which is exactly what a course like this needs. Macdonald templates live or die on green contour and subtle ground movement, and now I get to build those from real numbers.

Going from a 2007 mountain course in the Sierra to a 1914 template course in the Alleghenies is about as big a swing as this library takes. I am fired up for it.

Keep an eye on the vote page, and thanks again for another good round.