Truckee, Calif. – Ground has been broken on The Club at Gray’s Crossing, a new 18-hole project from Jacobsen Hardy Golf Course Design. Set on terrain above Lake Tahoe, The Club at Gray’s Crossing will serve as the exclusive members course for Tahoe Mountain Club, a real estate/resort community developed by East West Partners.
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”I wouldn’t have chosen this level of involvement if Tahoe Mountain Club weren’t such a extraordinary club development,” says Jacobsen. “The golf course we’ve designed for Gray’s Crossing is something special – it had to be considering the land we were provided, the quality of the golf now in the ground, and the sheer scope of resort and real estate amenities already in place. Anything less wouldn’t cut it.”
With its planned 54 holes, Tahoe Mountain Club is the golf component of East West-developed Tahoe Mountain Resorts, which also includes four distinct real estate communities: Old Greenwood, the Village at Northstar, The Highlands at Northstar, and the new Gray’s Crossing.
Later this summer, 195 home sites will be made available in Gray’s Crossing’s two newest neighborhoods, The Ridge and The Woods; home sites will range from $300,000 to $800,000. This follows last summer’s initial real estate offering of 101 home sites in the Gray’s Crossing neighborhood known as The Bluffs, which sold out in three hours.
”Peter Jacobsen and Jim Hardy are a good fit for what we hope to create at North Lake Tahoe,” says Blake Riva, a senior partner with East West Partners. “We have a long-term commitment to the Truckee-Tahoe area, and we are creating a year-round recreation destination, with golf being an important element. It’s clear to us that Peter Jacobsen shares our desire to make golf fun, inclusive and accessible to everyone. Jacobsen and Hardy also share the Tahoe region’s and our deep commitment to the environment.
“In selecting Peter as director of golf, we saw in him a person with a unique set of skills that can help us create something that goes beyond golf,” Riva adds. “We are looking to Peter to create events and promotions and sponsorships that will not only link up with what’s already here in the Truckee-Tahoe area, but produce something entirely new.”
Jacobsen Hardy has routed the new Gray’s Crossing layout on diverse property adjacent to the Woods and Ridge neighborhoods. The 18-hole design – now being built by Weitz Golf International – features a mix of open meadow holes replete with seas of wild flowers, combined with mountainous hole settings cut from thick stands of lodgepole and ponderosa pine.
“The back nine is more rugged than the front, built higher on the mountain, and that’s where you get the first taste of the tree-lined setting,” Jacobsen says. “It’s a big, dense forest with some dramatic golf terrain and great views of the Carson range. But there are wonderful breaks in this environment, for example at 13 and 14, which play through a high meadow. There’s a real ‘Sound of Music’ quality to these meadow holes. They provide diversity to the experience, and the wildflowers provide a spectrum of color you rarely see on a golf course.”
Thanks to seasonal water flow off the mountains, these wildflowers bloom several times a year – each time in a different color, creating unusually vivid settings on several holes. The closing par-5 – a risk-reward hole featuring a double fairway – requires the strategic crossing of one such floral hazard.
Higher points on the property are influenced by this run-off as well. At the 185-yard par-3 8th, Jacobsen Hardy is working with Alliance Golf of Indiana to harness this flow into a recirculating, rock-strewn waterfall that sits just left of the putting surface.
“There’s a bunker right of the green, which is generous, but you’ll have to thread it,” Hardy explains. “The tee box at (No.) 8 also provides golfers an incredible view of the Carson Range in the distance. It’s one of those rare holes where the sensory influences combine with the golfing challenge to make it truly memorable.
“The altitude here greatly influenced how we designed the course and how it will be built,” says Hardy, who notes that Gray’s Crossing sits at about 6,000 feet above sea level. “First off, our back-tee yardage is about 300 yards longer than what we normally design, to account for the altitude-aided distance. However, we moved the forward tees back only about 100 yards because those players don’t benefit from thin air in the same way.”
The Club at Gray’s Crossing will measure 7,534 from the tips, 5,139 from the most forward tees. There are three more sets in.
Jacobsen Hardy has also resolved to sod the entire course next year, a nod to the truncated growing season at 6,000 feet. Old Greenwood – a Nicklaus design opened in 2004 – was also sodded tee to green, according to Joel Blaker, director of agronomy at Tahoe Mountain Club. West Coast Turf will custom grow a bluegrass mixture for Gray’s Crossing starting this September, says Blaker, delivering it for sodding next summer.
For Gray’s Crossing, Jacobsen Hardy and Blaker specified a mixture of five bluegrass varieties: Award, Liberator, Midnight, Unique and Rugby. Determining this mixture was straightforward.
“I went to the NTEP trials and chose five of the most cold-tolerate varieties with the highest resistance to snow mold,” says Blaker, who notes the newer low-mow bluegrass varieties, while successful at altitude, have not yet tested as well with regard to snow mold resistance. “We use a bluegrass mixture at Old Greenwood. We verticut a lot and cut the fairways super tight, 5/8 of inch. Anything lower than a half-inch and you get Poa annua encroachment. So that’s our expectation for Gray’s Crossing.”
Blaker grew in the Old Greenwood layout and has since taken the title of director of agronomy for all three Tahoe Mountain Club courses. His former assistant at Old Greenwood, Michael Cornette, has been promoted to head superintendent at The Club at Gray’s Crossing.
Gray’s Crossing is going to be a very unique golf course – really nice topography, whereas Old Greenwood is flatter,” Blaker explains. “So many of the holes have really cool looks. The 7th at Gray’s is going to be a phenomenal par-5 with huge rock outcroppings jutting up behind the green complex. Holes 13 and 14 play around our 3.5-acre irrigation lake. We’re not going to have any boring golf holes out there.”