Dateline May 17, 2012, Hampton Cove and Silver Lakes
Having had our fill of Florence and Muscle Shoals, it was time to move on to the Huntsville area for another beautiful Alabama state park. Monte Sano State Park sits at the top of a mountain about sixteen hundred feet above Huntsville. The first day there it rained, which gave us a chance to enjoy the Roadtrek, read, and do nothing. We headed out the next morning for the Hampton Cove complex.
The courses drained well overnight, and we were on the tee around 11:00 for another match with Pete and Bunny. We started with the River Course, the only Robert Trent Jones Trail layout without a single bunker. Not one. The River Course is a throwback to the way courses were built a long time ago. Dirt got pushed up just enough to shape the greens and tees, and everything else, including the massive old oaks, was left where it stood. There is water on sixteen of the eighteen holes, and after a few seasons of fighting traps, an entire round without one was a small pleasure. The match was John and Bunny against Janice and Pete. John and Bunny took it.
Back to the state park for a gourmet feast and a good night's sleep. In the morning we broke camp. Big production. Unplug the electric, disconnect the water hose. We drove the five miles back to Hampton Cove for the second course, the Highlands.
The Highlands had recently been renovated to take it back to its original Scottish links design, with rolling fairways and long waving grasses. Plenty of sand, water, hills, and trees. The nicer of the two courses, we thought. A beautiful day for it. The Wilsons against the Warenskis. Pete and Bunny took the match.
From there we drove about eighty miles south to the Gadsden area to play Silver Lakes. The drive was lovely, lakes and Tennessee River views the whole way. In Gadsden we stayed at Noccalula Park and Campground, a county park with picnic grounds and a tall waterfall named for a Cherokee legend.
Silver Lakes sits on rolling terrain at the edge of the Talladega National Forest, between Anniston and Gadsden. Golf Digest's Places to Play had named it one of the country's Great Value courses. The complex has three championship nines plus a nine-hole short course, anchored by a number of strong par fours that play to pedestal greens perched thirty to forty feet above fairway level.
The courses we played had been almost entirely rebuilt over the previous two years. On April 27, 2011, a wave of tornadoes ripped through Alabama in what is now called the Super Outbreak, the deadliest tornado day in the modern era. An EF4 went through Silver Lakes. Forty thousand trees came down. The top of the clubhouse came off. Greens were torn up. The reopening, by the time we got there in 2012, was a remarkable piece of work.
The trees that survived will take decades to come all the way back, but the course was playable and beautiful.
We started on the Backbreaker. It's a photographer's nine, with elevated tees that look out across the Appalachian foothills. We figured out how the name happened by the time we lined up our approach on the first hole. The green sits steeply above the fairway. Climbing back up to the cart after the green was, in fact, a back exercise.
Then the Mindbreaker, slightly less brutal but still a real test of decision-making.
We had one slithering visitor on one of the holes, about five feet long. He did not seem to like us much, and the feeling was mutual. We think he was a harmless brown water snake. We chose not to interrupt his afternoon further.
The Wilsons took the day from the Warenskis. Silver Lakes is highly recommended for a great day of golf, especially given what it has come through.
On to Oxmoor Valley in Birmingham.
Standings: Bunny 4, Pete 2, John 4, Janice 2.
