Pretty and tricky

Plenty of golfers have heard of the attractions of the Chewelah Golf and Country Club – gorgeous mountain setting, 27 holes, small-town hospitality.

Yet after a recent visit, another distinction occurred to me – this course has at least three holes that are utterly unlike any other holes I’ve ever played, mostly because of that steep mountain setting.

Those holes are No. 9, No. 10 and the odd little No. 16.

On a recent visit, our foursome, made up of newspaper duffers, found out that these three holes are massively challenging – and require the kind of local knowledge that we completely lack.

Follow us around as we slash our way, disastrously, around these holes:

No . 9, Par 4, 405 yards from the white tees, 486 from the blues: We made our first mistake as we stood high up on the white tee box, admiring the view straight downhill to a distant fairway.

“Hey,” said one of our group. “I’ll bet this hole would be even more fun from the blue tees.”

I turned around, craned my neck, pulled a neck tendon, and there, high above, I spied the blue tee box. Playing from the blues lengthens this par four to a massive 486 yards. We clearly had no business playing from the blues.

So, after a brief summit push, we proceeded to play from the blues. We could make out what looked like a sharp dogleg to the left – it was hard to be sure without a telescope. Mostly, we were looking down on a vast canopy of ponderosa pines, cedars and tamaracks.

This towering vantage was perfect for the Big Hitter in our group, who tees his ball way up and somehow manages to hit straight, low rifle shots – screaming triples off the center-field wall. He proceeded to fire one straight down the middle, the ball falling, falling, and then rolling, rolling, rolling, right down the middle, well into the dogleg’s corner.

The rest of us proceeded to spray tee shots over the forest canopy – some right, some left, all without hope of retrieval. Finally, I got hold of a straight, high deep one. It, too, hit the fairway and rolled and rolled and rolled.

After an exciting rappel, we finally made it down to the fairway where I was feeling pretty smug about hitting a 280-yard drive (even if 100 of those yards were accounted for by the sheer elevation drop). I soon discovered, to my chagrin, that my massive poke wasn’t nearly massive enough. I still had 200 yards to go, and more to the point, I hadn’t made it past the corner, which was still another 25 yards away.

Clearly, I had no business playing from the blues.

I tried to draw a three-hybrid around the corner onto the green. It went arrow-straight, of course, which happens only when I try to draw, so the ball ended up on pine straw behind a thicket.

I’ll spare you the ensuing details except to say I gave myself a double-bogey, which was quite charitable.

No. 10, Par 4, 271 yards from the whites, 318 yards from the blues: Those yardages don’t sound daunting at all, do they?

No, not until we stood on the tee and realized we had to re-gain most of the elevation we had lost on the previous hole.

In other words, this hole goes straight up. We contemplated a massive wall of grass, looming high over our puny selves. We could barely see the top of a flag, fluttering high above, like the Union Jack on the Tower of London.

This was the worst possible scenario for our Big Hitter, he of the low rifle shot. He zinged a dart directly into the hillside, where it practically bounced backward. The rest of us should have simply taken a 7-iron and lofted one softly onto the fairway, leaving another easy 7-iron to the summit.

Instead, of course, we hit drivers and watched our balls ricochet left into the trees or right into what the yardage book charitably describes as “death.”

From our various drop points and bivouac sites, we hit blind shots onto a green that, naturally, lies on a serious back-to-front slope. We would have tried to keep our approach shots below the hole, except we had no idea where, exactly, the hole was. All we could do was take one extra club and loft one in the general direction of the top of the flagstick.

After various adventures involving a sand trap on the left, I again gave myself a double-bogey and was relieved to have it.

No. 16, Par 4, 287 yards from the whites, 318 yards from the blues: Here’s another hole that sounds short and easy – and probably is, for true Chewelah veterans.

But not for us. We stood on the tee box and asked each other, “Exactly where are we supposed to hit this drive?”

This is a risky little left-hook hole, and from the tee box all you can see is a swampy morass in front you, a giant pond lining the left side, fairway traps tucked next to every tiny landing spot, and a wall of trees (and houses) ready to swallow up everything that is a little too right and a little too long. The smart thing to do is hit an iron short of the traps and take an easy short iron into the green.

We, of course, never even considered that. Instead, we trekked over to the blue tees for more of challenge and also because we thought it gave us a more direct path down the fairway. Our Big Hitter proceeded to hit one so far left it went over both ponds and hit dry land near somebody else’s green. I faded a drive just a little right, which proved plenty right enough to skitter all the way through the fairway, through the trees, and lodge against someone’s backyard storage shed.

Several traps, tree branches and dunked chips later, we limped home, defeated by what is probably the easiest, but craziest, hole on the course.

No doubt about it, this course earns its relatively lofty 125 slope rating, even on what should be its easy holes.

However, we’re Chewelah veterans now. Next time we show up, we’ll have this course mastered.

Strategy No.1: stick to the white tees.