Monterey Peninsula Country Club: Dunes Course

Monterey Peninsula Country Club's Dunes Course is a classic Golden Age design along the stunning Monterey coastline, originally conceived by the legendary pairing of Charles B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor. The club features two distinct courses — the Dunes and the Shore — and has served as a host venue for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, offering sweeping ocean views and strategic template holes in one of golf's most sought-after settings.

Monterey Peninsula Country Club stands on a storied stretch of California coastline, its two golf courses woven into the fabric of the Monterey Peninsula's rich golfing heritage alongside neighbors Pebble Beach Golf Links, Cypress Point Club, and Spyglass Hill. The club's story begins with Samuel Finley Brown Morse, the visionary developer who in 1919 formed the Del Monte Properties company and acquired vast real estate holdings on the Monterey Peninsula with plans to create a world-renowned resort destination. Morse recognized that championship golf would be essential to that vision, and after overseeing the creation of Pebble Beach Golf Links in 1919, he turned his attention to establishing a private club for the growing community of residents and visitors drawn to the peninsula. A charter for the Monterey Peninsula Country Club was granted by the State of California on January 19, 1925. An organizational meeting was held the following month, with sixty-eight charter members and Morse himself elected as the club's first president.

Morse then recruited two of the most distinguished golf architects in America to design the club's first course: Charles Blair Macdonald, the father of American golf course architecture, and his associate Seth Raynor. The two men had already collaborated on landmark courses including the National Golf Links of America, Yale Golf Course, and Chicago Golf Club. Raynor traveled to the Monterey Peninsula to lay out the Dunes Course in 1924, drawing on the template hole philosophy that was his and Macdonald's hallmark. However, Raynor died in January 1926 before construction was complete, and Robert Hunter, a golf course designer and author of the influential book "The Links," was brought in to finish the project. The Dunes Course opened on July 2, 1926, with more than 300 people attending the grand opening celebration.

The Dunes Course plays to a par of 72 and stretches 7,063 yards from the championship tees. Raynor's template-based approach is evident throughout the routing, with holes inspired by great designs from the British Isles. The fourth hole, a long par three of approximately 230 yards, is a classic Biarritz design. The course hosted the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am from 1947 through 1964, rotating alongside Pebble Beach and Cypress Point in what was one of professional golf's most distinctive and beloved events. Tony Holguin set the course record of 63 during the 1954 Crosby. In recent years, Viktor Hovland shot a 62 in February 2024, establishing a new mark. The Dunes Course underwent significant work over the decades. A 1998 reconstruction led by Rees Jones addressed persistent drainage problems caused by clay soils beneath the sandy surface layer. Jones raised greens, reshaped fairways, and removed encroaching trees to improve both playability and the course's visual connection to the surrounding landscape. In 2016, a more comprehensive restoration was undertaken by the Fazio Design Group, with Tim Jackson and David Kahn reimagining portions of the routing to recapture the authentic sensation of playing among the dunes that give the course its name. The work honored the strategic principles of Raynor's original template designs while updating the course for modern play.

In 1959, the membership purchased the club from Del Monte Properties for a token sum of twenty dollars, transitioning to independent ownership. With this newfound autonomy, the club commissioned a second eighteen-hole layout. Bob E. Baldock and Jack Neville, the latter of whom had co-designed Pebble Beach Golf Links four decades earlier, laid out the Shore Course, which opened for play in 1961. Bruce Harris refined the design in 1962. The Shore Course offered pleasant golf but lacked the dramatic quality of the coastline on which it sat, with most holes oriented away from the ocean. That changed dramatically in the early 2000s when the club engaged Mike Strantz to completely reimagine the Shore Course. Strantz, a former protege of Tom Fazio who had established himself as a standout daring and artistic architect of his generation, proposed a radical rerouting that would reverse the orientation of many hole to face south toward the Pacific Ocean, Spyglass Hill, and Cypress Point. Where the original Baldock layout offered perhaps one shot toward the ocean, Strantz's vision incorporated approximately fourteen holes with ocean-facing views. The membership approved the project on April 22, 2002, and construction began on February 10, 2003. Strantz's process was intensely personal and deeply artistic. He sketched each hole in precise detail, and construction crews taped his hand-drawn plans to bulldozer windows to shape the terrain within inches of his vision. He built the course in nonsequential sections, three to four holes at a time, and rented a house on what became the sixteenth hole so he could oversee every detail. Throughout the sixteen-month construction period, Strantz was battling oral cancer, undergoing chemotherapy that caused him to lose more than a hundred pounds. Despite his declining health, he poured himself into the Shore Course with an intensity that produced what many regard as his masterpiece. The grand opening was held on June 11, 2004. Strantz passed away in June 2005 at the age of fifty. A plaque honoring his memory was placed on a large rock beside the fifteenth green, the hole he considered the signature of his design.The fifteenth hole, a double-dogleg that plunges toward the ocean through corridor of cypress trees and bunkers, concluding at a green framed by Strantz's favorite rock with infinity views of the Pacific, has become a celebrated hole in California golf. The par-three eleventh, played from an elevated granite outcropping with panoramic views of the Dunes Course, Spyglass Hill, and Cypress Point, is another standout. In 2010, the Shore Course entered the rotation of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, a PGA Tour event descended from the Crosby, replacing Poppy Hills Golf Course. The Shore Course appeared in the tournament rotation from 2010 through 2020, and again in 2022 and 2023. During the 2016 AT&T Pro-Am, Sung Kang shot a remarkable 60 in the second round to set the course record.

Beyond golf, the club occupies a property of more than 400 acres that includes a Spanish Revival clubhouse designed by architect Clarence Tantau in 1926, a half-mile private white sand beach with a bathhouse at Point Joe, the historic "Old Swimmin' Hole" fashioned from a converted quarry, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and multiple dining venues. The club has hosted numerous USGA championships over the decades, including the 1952 U.S. Girls' Junior won by a young Mickey Wright, the 1958 U.S. Senior Amateur, senior women's amateur events in 1968 and 1976, and the 2025 U.S. Women's Mid-Amateur won by Ina Kim-Schaad on the Dunes Course. Monterey Peninsula Country Club celebrated its centennial in 2025, a century of golf played against a standout dramatic natural backdrops in the game.