Among the Redwoods
Some golf courses impose themselves upon a landscape, and others find their place within it. Northwood Golf Club belongs firmly to the latter.
Tucked into a bend of California’s Russian River, just north of the Bohemian Grove, Northwood occupies 70 acres of dense redwood woodland near the small town of Monte Rio. It is only nine holes and less than 3,000 yards, but measurements are irrelevant here. Northwood’s appeal lies in intimacy: a short walk beneath an extraordinary canopy, where golf and landscape have spent almost a century growing into one another.
The course dates to 1928, when Jack Neville had the idea of creating a course for members of the nearby Bohemian Club. Neville was already an important figure in Californian golf — a five-time state amateur champion, member of the 1923 US Walker Cup team and co-designer, with Douglas Grant, of Pebble Beach.
For Northwood, he enlisted Robert Hunter and Alister MacKenzie. The latter would become one of golf architecture’s defining figures, responsible for courses including Cypress Point and, later, Augusta National. Here, however, the canvas was considerably more modest: nine holes threaded through a forest beside the Russian River.
The result has endured with remarkably little fuss.
Designed Around The Land
Northwood plays to a par of 36 and stretches to roughly 2,900 yards from the back tees. On paper, it is short. On the ground, measurements quickly become less useful.
The redwoods stand immediately beside the fairways, creating immense vertical walls of bark and foliage. Their presence narrows sightlines, frames greens and gives almost every misplaced shot a consequence. What was already woodland golf in 1928 has become increasingly intricate as the forest has matured.
There is a pleasing contradiction to the experience: the scale of the course is small, while the scale of its surroundings is monumental.
This relationship between landscape and architecture gives Northwood its identity. Rather than clearing the property to make room for golf, the holes feel as though they have been slipped into the spaces available. Fairways bend between trunks. Greens occupy small pockets of space. The course reveals itself gradually rather than presenting everything from the tee.
Small Greens, Big Decisions
Length was never intended to provide Northwood’s principal defence. Its difficulty comes from angles, position and the small, undulating greens associated with MacKenzie’s work.
The 382-yard second finishes at a punchbowl green, using the contours of the ground to gather the hole around the putting surface. At the sixth, just 280 yards, a littering of fairway bunkers turns an apparently simple short par four into an exercise in restraint. The 381-yard seventh introduces another familiar MacKenzie device: bunkers positioned deceptively short of the green, manipulating the golfer’s perception of distance.
Three of Northwood’s par fours measure less than 295 yards. Yet the course repeatedly asks a more interesting question than how far the ball can be hit: where should the next shot be played from?
It is golf architecture reduced to its essentials. There is little excess and nowhere to hide. A handful of hazards, a change in elevation or the angle of a green can transform a hole that occupies only a few hundred yards of land.
A Forest In Motion
The landscape, of course, has not stood still.
Northwood is MacKenzie’s only nine-hole design in America and the redwood forest is fundamental to its character. Many of the enormous trees that now define the course have simply reached remarkable proportions in the decades since Northwood opened.
As trunks have widened, playing corridors have narrowed. The architecture has subtly changed with them.
There is something appealing about that evolution. Golf courses are often restored towards a particular moment in their history, with trees removed and features reconstructed in an attempt to recover an architect’s original intentions. At Northwood, the passing of time is more visible.
Nature has effectively become another architect.
The sensation is perhaps strongest between shots. Sunlight filters through the canopy in narrow shafts. Temperatures fall beneath the trees. Fairways disappear behind enormous trunks, while the Russian River traces its way around the property. For a course occupying relatively little ground, Northwood has an unusual ability to make the outside world feel distant.
Nine Is Enough
Northwood has subsequently earned a reputation far beyond what might be expected of a modest public nine-hole course. Golf Magazine included it among its 50 best nine-hole courses in the world, praising the combination of intimate woodland golf and the sense of escape created by the redwoods.
That compactness is important. Northwood does not feel like half a golf course, nor does it require another nine holes to complete the idea. Its scale is part of the proposition.
At a moment when golf architecture is rediscovering shorter courses, walkability and a lighter relationship with the landscape, Northwood can feel unexpectedly contemporary. Yet there is nothing new about the principles at work here. The course has been quietly making the same argument since 1928.
There is no need for spectacle and little interest in announcing itself. Instead, there are nine thoughtful holes beneath the redwoods, shaped by three important figures in American golf architecture and softened by almost a century of growth.
Northwood’s enduring quality comes from that restraint. It offers something increasingly rare: a place where the landscape remains larger than the game being played within it.
Nine holes, in this case, are more than enough.