Ryan,
To add, the best way of looking at this is from Geoff Shackelford's website:
As Rustic Canyon celebrates one year of play, many continue to rave about superintendent Jeff Hicks’s conditioning efforts.
Yet a few brave people ask, what’s with the brown patches off to the sides of most of the fairways?
Actually, the areas of exposed sandy soil, offset by patches of clumpy fescue grass (and the occasional weed), were supposed to be even more prevalent in the design. Believe it or not, we like those areas and wanted more of them! Here’s why.
Because the sandy soil at Rustic Canyon is similar to the sandbelt courses of Australia where such exposed “crunchy” areas add to the character of the golf, we hoped to see a similar form of “ranch golf” transported to the United States in a climate and setting that was conducive to such a style.
Rustic Canyon sits on a sandy flood plain and is surrounded by coastal sage scrub. That’s a mix of plants and soils similar to the look and feel of only three other Mediterranean climates in the world: Australia, southern Italy and the lower tip of South America.
Still, who cares, right? Why not have grass all the way to the edges?
The first priority was not aesthetic, but one involving function.
We did not want the irrigation system turning the brown, crusty native areas into rainforests.
Jim Wagner spent a great deal of time working with Jeff Hicks and irrigation contract Charlie Amos to make sure that irrigation water did not directly hit the native grass areas that border the wide fairways. Nothing is worse than playing a course where the immediate native areas are lush from too much overspray, while twenty yards inside the natives a ball is easily found and played. It looks bad and plays even worse.
But we also knew that with the dark green rye fairways, the stark look of going immediately from lush green fairways to brown native areas was something we didn’t care for on many modern courses bordered by prairie grasses. And with the sandy soil of “Happy Camp,” the hope was that the irrigation system could be laid out to only have “overspray” hitting these transition areas.
If the course was seeded properly with fescue around the edges (which it was), the dirt areas would support the occasional clumpy, snowball shaped fescues that would take hole, while still providing a sandy, tight lie for recovery play.
Now, the areas that were created by cart traffic were not by design. But we do believe that as long as the fairways, greens, tees and approaches are in as fine a condition as they are now, most golfers will understand that these “brown patches,” (transitional areas in doublespeak), were intentional.
Hopefully the look will be accepted based the “rustic” aesthetic it adds to the course and not seen as faulty irrigation design.