California’s Best Par-Three Course

The Challenge at Monarch Dunes

Bob Fagan

If you haven’t previously been exactly enthralled to play a par-three course, this one could change your mind. It certainly did mine. Typically, par-three courses have been architectural afterthoughts featuring mundane challenges and substandard conditioning. The Challenge Course at the Monarch Dunes Golf Club in Nipomo, close to the Central California coast, is anything but. You will discover an entertainingly challenging, beautifully manicured par-three delight that compares to any in America.

Oddly enough, the best American par-three courses have been situated at such staunchly private clubs such as: Pine Valley, Augusta National, the Olympic Club, Sherwood Country Club, Colleton River, Sutton Bay, and a few others that precious few people even know about, yet alone get to play. In the nineties, the Treetops Resort in Northern Michigan built Threetops, an amazing public-access par-three layout with vast elevation changes in a pristine forest setting. Well, Monarch Dunes is California’s answer and, if there is a better one-shotter layout in California, it has escaped my attention. What’s more there are twelve delightful holes!

This twelve-hole layout is not only priced at a bargain ($19), but it takes a lot shorter time to play. Typically, one can expect to finish in about two hours or less, and the management thoughtfully schedules 15-minute intervals between tee times. What’s more, the course is an easy, pleasant walk.

Like its regulation sister course at Monarch Dunes, “The Old Course”, golf course architect, Damian Pascuzzo and partner, touring pro Steve Pate, were again called in by the developer/owner, John Scardino, to also design this layout. The result was a masterful, versatile layout. With any par-three design, the putting surfaces are the key, and Pascuzzo/Pate team built many shapes and contours into the very large velvet bent grass greens. There is rugged, scruffy mounding crafted in an Irish links motif that adorns and protects the targets, in addition to several lakes and ample bunkering providing the hazards. More importantly, the conditioning of the greens and tees are anything but scruffy. The greens are immaculately smooth and fast, a pleasure and also a challenge to be sure.

What is particularly interesting about The Challenge Course is that it is, as the name suggests, a challenge. That said, when set up with accessible hole locations, it is very playable. The holes vary from 80 yards from the tips to a very shallow green, to the longest at 242 yards, and include a semi-blind 202-yard uphill finisher that plays even longer uphill and into the prevailing wind. That downhill 242-yard fifth ranks as one of the best par-threes anywhere where the large green is flanked by water to the front, right, and rear; and a big bunker to the left. It is a dazzler that may have even the scratch players pulling out a driver when the breeze picks up!

No matter what the distance, The Challenge’s green shapes dictate that even the skilled player had better keep their attention to the shot at hand, and make The Challenge just that. Miss a green in the wrong spot and it is very difficult to recover in par. The putting surfaces as mentioned are quite large (average 8,000 s.f.), yet play much smaller due to the strong contouring. Those slopes will funnel the ball either to or away from the hole, and long putts often have pronounced humps and ridges to traverse. In other words, scoring is no routine task at The Challenge, a very testing and interesting layout. For the advanced player, The Challenge makes for a terrific venue for a money match or a place to sharpen your iron play – the perfect complement to neighboring Old Course.

When you add the accommodating staff headed by Matt Kalbak, the tasty food and good service, the spacious practice area, with the premier Old Course and California’s “Best Par-Three Course” that anyone can play, it makes good sense to visit Monarch Dunes – and tell them that Bob Fagan sent you!