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Captivating Coeur d'Alene
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Let's play a little word-association game, shall we? When I say "Idaho," you say ... That's right, "golf."
I am proud and humbled to have such a knowledgeable readership so in tune with my thinking. We go together like meat and potatoes.
Northwest Idaho has one of America's more spectacular golfing getaways, thanks to
Circling Raven Golf Club and nearby
Coeur d'Alene Resort (golf packages from $199 to $849).
This isn't the easiest place to get to, but then that's why they call it unspoiled. And a one-stop flight through Minneapolis to Spokane, Wash., followed by a 45-minute drive is unlikely to french-fry your nerves, especially when you see the payoff.
Beauty in the Backwoods
As much as I love golf, it's the rare course that merits the hassle of air travel. Circling Raven does. (The course is an amenity of the adjacent Coeur d'Alene Casino Resort Hotel, though you don't have to stay there to play it.)
It was designed by Gene Bates, whom cognoscenti and cognoscenti alone know as the former architectural partner of PGA Tour star Fred Couples.
Such arrangements generally resemble the nerd in high school who does the star quarterback's homework, so it's nice that Bates gets full credit for this masterful layout.
Admittedly, he had a hell of a canvas to work with: 620 dramatic, rolling acres -- more than three times the size of an average course -- unblemished by any housing.
This purity accentuates the vast scale; yet there is a wonderful attention to detail and variety throughout the design, which doesn't coast along on the setting for its greatness.
New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane once dissed a Joe Mantegna performance by saying (I'm paraphrasing here), "His fancy suits seem to be wearing him." Such criticism can't be leveled at Circling Raven, where you'd have to work hard to come up with quibbles.
And the value is unbeatable, at $90 on the weekends in high season. The greens fees would be two or three times that in any metropolitan market.
I played the layout three times in two days and enjoyed each subsequent loop even more than the preceding one. OK, one quibble -- I didn't spy a single circling raven.
I did spy a filching raven at the Resort course at Coeur d'Alene, a five-star getaway all the way, if the clear No. 2 in the area's one-two golf punch. The bird was flying off with a bag of -- what else? -- potato chips in its beak (clearly, a raven less influenced by Poe than by P.G. Wodehouse).
Evan Rothman
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