The course saved nearly $80,000 by using California greens. The native soils and climate favored this type of construction.

Near Santa Fe, with its intriguing amalgam of Native-American, Hispanic and Anglo cultures, residents often attribute fortuitous events to "synchronicity," as if not-always-aligned forces magically join together to drive local developments. That was certainly the case at Black Mesa Golf Club, located 15 minutes from Santa Fe in La Mesilla, N.M. Here, a magical coming together of the developers, the architect and the Santa Clara Pueblo tribe has produced an award-winning golf experience.

Named the "Best New Affordable Public Course for 2003" by Golf Digest, Black Mesa was constructed for just $3.5 million ($3 million for 18 holes and a practice facility, and $500,000 for a clubhouse and maintenance building). Its greens fees were initially set at $35 to $40, and are now $50 during the week and on weekends (golf cars cost an extra $16). Yet it receives accolades normally reserved for much pricier tracks: "Top 10 new course you can play" (Golf Magazine), "a stunning layout" (Golfweek), "gorgeous, tough, enigmatic" (Travel + Leisure Golf), to name a few.

The builders disturbed little native ground and had to replant only about 6 acres.

In the late 1990s, Eddie Peck, Pat Brockwell and Paul Ortiz were involved in planning a new golf facility on nearby state trust land. Because that site was adjacent to property owned by the Santa Clara, the developers approached the tribe for easement rights to run pipes to carry sewage effluent for irrigation. By coincidence, Calvin Tafoya, a former governor of the Santa Clara Pueblo and now the CEO of a tribal development corporation, had been considering a tribe-owned golf course. He came up with a proposal that suited everyone. The timing, in this case, was everything.

"I pointed out to them," Tafoya recalls, "that rather than us competing, why don't we work together on tribal lands."

"We had a great site, but this one was better," says Brockwell, who is Black Mesa's superintendent. "And partnering with the tribe also simplified a lot of the planning and permitting. It got us down to one set of rules instead of dealing with state, county, neighborhood associations and everyone else."

That saved time and money, naturally. In addition, the jaw-dropping scenery at the course site — with the namesake Black Mesa and mountain vistas in the background and rugged sandstone ridges and sparse native vegetation in the foreground — made it easy for the developers to let the land determine the links, not the other way around. This was another big cost-cutter.

"If you have a routing plan that utilizes natural features, you don't have to disturb as much land to create sculpting so that you have certain elements of play," says Baxter Spann, the course's architect, a partner in Houston-based Finger Dye Spann. "You're able to use the land as it is and disturb less of it, which means there's less grading, there's less irrigation, there's less grassing, there's less water use. I think we have somewhere around 85 acres of irrigated turfgrass, and that includes a pretty large practice facility."

Other budget-preserving steps made Black Mesa possible for $3.5 million:

• California greens. Spann says about $60,000 to $80,000 was saved using this technique instead of USGA-type greens. The native soils and climate favored this type of construction, which eliminates a gravel blanket layer by placing 12 inches of seedbed sand directly over the subgrade. "We found no detriment at all to building the greens that way," Spann says.
• Irrigation control. Water is a precious commodity in New Mexico, and its use was limited by allowing natural vegetation (or rock) to populate areas to the sides of fairways, which are not irrigated. The developers also simplified the watering of tees, greens and fairways by installing a block system with decoders. Because each valve in this system runs two or three sprinklers, there are fewer valves with less-pressurized pipe and a less-complex wiring system. Brockwell estimates a 15-percent savings when compared with the more common practice of valve-and-head irrigation.
• Limited revegetation. By disturbing little native ground, the builders were required to replant only about 6 acres, most of it on the banks of tee areas. "There was nothing else that had large areas that were disturbed and needed to be revegetated, which is a real chore in our climate," says Brockwell, who has seen courses in his region with up to 50 acres to repair. "There's just no help from Mother Nature. Those areas on other courses tend to require some kind of temporary irrigation, and it's several years before they look natural again."
• Gravel cart paths. The arid climate allowed Black Mesa's developers to forgo paved paths for less-expensive crushed rock. The result blends more naturally with the course's environment, which is isolated from roads and residences.
• Few chemicals. "I've saved a lot of money on pesticides," Brockwell says. "We have a strong organic component to our fertility and maintenance and that's really suppressed a lot of disease problems." All pesticide so far has been applied with hand-held sprayers, and fungicides and herbicides have hardly been needed. "Our climate helps us there," he adds. "I can always dry things out. We maintain the course on the dry side so it plays more like a true links course."
• Grow your own. No sod was laid, even on greens and tees. "We used straw mulch mats on areas that would normally have been sodded, and they were very effective," the superintendent says. The greens were planted with creeping bentgrass (Penn A-4) and the fairways are Kentucky bluegrass. The grow-in suffered because of an unusually hot, windy year. But because those areas were irrigated, the course that was planted in April 2002 was able to open for play exactly one year later.
• Budget bunkers. The developers planted fine fescues around the bunkers, making them no-mow areas and saving maintenance costs. The wispy, Scottish-links look is easy on the eye but a sore sight for errant shotmakers, who now pray they wind up in the sand rather than the high grass. "It gives those bunkers a lot more respect," Brockwell says.