The Last Frontier: 5 - The Prairie Club

We were ten minutes outside of Valentine, Nebraska when I got woken up from a nap to Caleb shouting in my ear, “We found a lake, Nico. Let’s go.” Passing the occasional pair of half open, broken camping tents and 25 year-old Seadoos, the four of us found an appropriately small beach to place our dirty, worn out shoes and newly purchased American Spirits. It was 105 degrees, which meant that the lake water felt like the dream we’ve all been waiting for. Valentine was our final stop before having to return the RV in Omaha, felt like the promised land. We had made it all this way.

We pulled into The Prairie Club entrance, its clubhouse coming more into view, and we could see distant fairways to our right. “Woah guys this place looks insanely cool”, Caleb said with wide eyes. 

“That’s not The Prairie Club. That’s CapRock Ranch”, Jack proclaimed. The four of us, including Kevin who was driving, all stretched out our necks and put our noses against the right side window to take a better look. CapRock Ranch, a private course designed by Gil Hanse, was to no one’s surprise awarded the Best New course in 2021 by Golf Digest. The golf course nerds had been hearing about this palace for a while. And when we showed up to the Prairie Club and started asking around how one might be able to play, the unanimous response was bleak. “Oh there’s no way. I haven’t played it. I don’t even know anyone who has played it. Anything that’s new, private, and gets those kinds of accolades usually plays the role of ‘Mr. I’m Better Than You’  for a couple of years, then they start to loosen up a little bit about guests and non-member play”.

“I’m okay with sneaking on,” Caleb said with a sly, facetious grin. We laughed it off and knew that even if we were able to play our cards right and walk our way onto CapRock Ranch’s first tee, we probably couldn’t fit it into our existing schedule.

As we parked appropriately, as out of sight as possible, we were welcomed by a young man our age speeding towards us in a golf cart. “I saw you guys driving in and I just had to see what the gig was” claimed our new host. That’s right; he came out to the parking lot to greet us. It seemed as if everyone in Nebraska was amused with our idea of a holiday. Although all of us have heard of far, far crazier things, like Tom Coyne walking the entirety of Ireland or Greg Ohlendorf playing all the Top 100 courses in the world, the attention we were getting for our RV odyssey made us feel like we were on the precipice of completing something neat.

Valentine’s nickname is “America’s Heart City” for more than the obviously eponymous reason; and that the street signs have actual hearts on them. From my point of view it is truly the heartland of America. Want a good breakfast or lunch? There’s only one choice. Go to the Coachlight Cafe. Want a drink? One place to go for that. Go to the Bunkhouse. Want anything else? Go kill it and cook it or go distill it and brew it. Pretty simple. There’s one bank, one main street, and an airport. Its uncomplicated nature appeals to those accustomed to having every choice on the planet to you at a moment's notice, being from the San Francisco Bay Area, that sometimes the complexity of options is simply too much. But for some reason, there are four world class golf courses, including a public track just a three minute drive from downtown called Frederick’s Peak.

As a native of Sioux Falls, Paul Schock had driven through South Dakota countless times, but had rarely set eyes on the Sandhills of Nebraska. Whether it came to becoming CFO of American Western Corporation, leading leveraged company buyouts, or building his own private equity firm, Paul seemed like he had his eyes set on other things. But after a couple of friends joined Sand Hills, he had to see what the gossip was about. The first time he ever saw the property was after he paid his membership fees. Sand Hills founder Dick Youngscap’s “make it and they will come” theory rung true yet again.

I could only imagine how wildly his priorities changed when he first looked at the property that now is home to The Prairie Club. Paul was guided there by the head professional at Sand Hills, Jim Kidd, due to Paul’s desire to find good fly-fishing close by. He got in contact with Cleve Trimble whose property on the Snake River was “bar none” one of the greatest ever spots Paul had ever fished in, and they quickly became good friends. But that’s not all the land had to offer: There were over 2,500 untouched acres of Nebraska Sandhills to marvel over. Trimble had an environmentally-friendly vision for his ranch: to make it a fishing and hunting destination, as well as building a world-class golf club. Both Schock and Trimble liked using the word “pilgrimage”, and wanted to highlight the location’s isolation to its advantage. Schock applied what he experienced at Sand Hills; if the golf was good enough then people would come and play. Easy as that.

We had just finished the 270 mile slog from Colorado to the northern tip of Nebraska, stopping at Pelican Beach on the way up, resulting in a 9 hour trip. But even through the natural depletion of our physical and mental stamina, we had to push on, especially when we heard the Horse Course was free of charge. The Horse Course, a par-3 layout designed by Gil Hanse and Geoff Shackleford, derives its name from the classic basketball game. Take a couple of clubs, find a flat spot to tee off, and pick any green to go to. Having no rules and an endless supply of quirky greens and short gras was a refreshing change of pace. The sand whipping us in the face from the dangerously convective winds was less so. I’ve played in some crazy conditions, a constant 30 mile per hour northerly with 40 mile per hour gusts at Old Macdonald to name one specific instance. Jack and I have played in rain, hail, blistering heat, and when the Air Quality Index read in Layman's terms “You’re an idiot if you go outside. Might as well just go ahead and smoke a pack of cigarettes.” But never have I walked off the course due to the weather until our time at the Horse Course. And as we stumbled into the lodge with hair that looked like we just took the trip from Colorado in the bed of a truck, we were met with “You guys were out there? You didn’t hear us blow the emergency air horn?” Apparently that’s how loud the wind can get.

We were hungry, and begging for at least one good cocktail. The choices one has when it comes to libations are limited. Beer, beer, and more beer. So when we set foot in the grandiose, red carpeted and white tablecloth main dining hall, I ordered a Martini, thinking that it was a common-enough order. “Okay. I think I can do that”, said the waitress. I squinted in confusion.

“Think? What do you mean? They definitely have gin and dry vermouth here. Just mix the two, that’s all I’m asking for,” I said under my breath. What came to the table made me laugh unexpectedly. The waitress plopped down a Michelob Ultra with a dill pickle spear in it. 

“A South Dakota martini for you, sir,” said the waitress. And at that moment, I’ve never been more in love with Nebraska. It seemed like its own world to me. The culture difference from California to the Midwest didn’t seem as uncomfortable as I expected it would. I wasn’t overwhelmed by the apparent strangeness that one being born and raised in the Bay Area would seem to experience here. I’m not saying they are similar, they are definitely not. But it wasn’t so much a process of adaptation, but of acceptance. I was a fly on the wall, and that’s what I wanted to be. That’s where I felt most comfortable. I needed my misconceptions about this place to shatter.

Both course’s settings are aptly named, the Dunes having almost no trees, set closer out to the road with uninhibited views, and the Pines having hundreds of thousands set along the banks of the Snake River. When talking to the staff and membership about CapRock Ranch in comparison to the Pines Course, the common response seemed to be that the only difference was that CapRock had “a couple of holes right on the cliff and that’s about it”, which is grotesquely biased and couldn’t be further from the truth. Unfortunately for The Prairie Club, there are lots of differences between the two, not including the cliffside holes (which are beyond stunning by the way). There’s this little factor called creative talent, which when it comes to Gil Hanse, Jim Wagner, and their crew of Cavemen (which is the term they use for their associates and construction crew members), are some of the most gifted golf course architects and shapers in the world. But although we knew we were missing out on the best course in Valentine, and probably the entirety of northern Nebraska, we were totally okay with playing the Dunes Course, which was rated the 22nd best public course in America according to Golf.com.

“Where the hell is Valentine?”, asked my father, circa 2015. No one at that time truly knew about this place. It was only 5 years old, and it takes time for golfers to read enough articles, see enough pictures, and hear enough about it from friends in order to actually lay down the cash to book a flight. The logic was always “Why would we go to the middle of nowhere Nebraska when Bandon Dunes is only an eight hour drive away?” And that’s a pretty good reason to look over, more like soar over, the idea of taking a pilgrimage, the word Paul Schock had in mind as the ethos for the property, out to The Prairie Club. I don’t think any of us in the crew would’ve gotten out there if it wasn’t for the pilgrimage we were already on. Thank God we took it.

“You see golf holes everywhere you look. And you find the desire to do what every little golfer dreams of: to design your own golf course”, Paul Schock describes. So he did. And he started with Tom Lehman and Chris Brands’ routing through the vast 1,700 acre property chosen by Schock for The Prairie Club. Every hole is a statement of monstrous scale. It is the largest looking golf course any of us have ever played. “It is purely massive”, Kevin said as we stood on the first tee. We looked at the scorecard to see where we wanted to play from, and decided not to go from the tips, stretching out to a brutal 7,500 yards and some change.

The holes that immediately come to mind are the 145 yard par-3 4th that includes a staggering 95 yard long green, and the 590 yard par-5 6th, which is home to probably the widest fairway of the trip, a staff member telling us that it clocked in at about 115 yards from cut line to cut line. A unanimous winner between the four of us for “Craziest Hole” was the par-4 8th. It seems like a simple drive off the tee, but there’s a lot more thinking that should go into one’s strategy. The fairway bunker on the right side is reachable, but the fairway just before it holds the best line into what can be a fully blind shot, making even the ideal line semi-blind. Wherever one's ball rests, it will have to conquer the monstrous chasm which is placed in between the fairway and an appropriately large green for such a long two-shot hole. The word “bunker” is too elementary to describe it, looking more like an earthquake fault line, a T-Rex footprint, or maybe even an active archeological dig site.

We made the mistake of walking it. The width, the length, and the topography made us pant and gasp for breath. As we finished our round and limped into the bar for some Advil and other sources of pain relief, we were approached by a man and his group we had seen earlier on the range before we teed off. “Did you guys walk?”, asked the man.

“Yeah, we did”, Jack responded with a sigh of regret.  

“Boy, we saw you guys walking up to the first tee this morning and said to ourselves, ‘They must be triathletes because no one sane would ever walk that course’. But should it have been a mistake to walk? I mean, this is the Nebraska Sandhills. The tee to green transitions are pretty simple to route. You should be able to walk all of these courses with no problems. Is CapRock Ranch that strenuous to walk? I don’t think so. The architects simply decided not to prioritize that element. And through its scale and apparent grandness, it seemed like those at the helm got too swept away with the idea of making the most gigantic course they possibly could instead of artfully crafting a concise and efficient routing. It felt like it was the popular jock that turned out to peak in his high school career. Ballyneal proved to us that there is a possibility of having the best of both worlds; having a course that feels large, bold, and forgiving, but yet being easy and approachable to walkers. We went around Ballyneal in 3 hours and 45 minutes. We never waited on a group in front of us and still finished the round in a gruesome five hours while walking the Dunes Course.

But through the glitches, the playing conditions were firm enough and the greens were undulating enough to signify it as a “modern links style” course. And through struggling to find the next tee box, the par threes and compilation of short par fours were some of the most strategic and beautiful of the trip. And there’s no cure for too much golf like, well, more golf. So we checked the weather, made sure we weren’t going to get blown off of our feet again, and headed back out to the Horse Course for the possibility of more bragging rights.

We sat down for dinner that evening, Jack bringing out a bottle that had been brought all the way from California specifically for our last night. But just before the cork was popped, as the sun started to go down, Caleb beckoned for us to come outside to see it set. We were bombarded with a striking view, never knowing that almost every color of the rainbow could be visibly present in a sunset. Living previously on the Big Island of Hawaii, I thought nothing could beat those sunsets, and was sorely mistaken with this one. It seemed fitting though, a concluding chapter, for the end of our trip to be blessed with such a spectacle as this. And with the bagpiper inviting everyone up from their own dinners and out on the back lawn to witness the sun set the sky on fire in distinct hues of green, orange, and magenta, I think a contemplative and reflective mood dawned on all four of us. This was our final stop. We were done after this. One last look at the barren yet beautiful landscape called the Sandhills that we had marveled over so much. It was a tough trip, and a long one at that; especially when four grown men share a living space smaller than the average American bedroom for 10 days with the slightest hint of sporadic cleanliness. The achy and smelly bodies, the stomach wrenching food, the sweltering heat and humidity, getting stuck in the sand, the South Dakota Martinis; all irrevocably worth it. We weren’t ready to say goodbye to the trip. It felt like saying goodbye to freedom, peace, and pleasure all in the same breath. But if I am certain of two things, it is this: golf in Nebraska is hands down some of the best in the entire world, and we will be back.