The second round of the weekend was on the Olympic Course at Gold Mountain Golf Club. I haven’t played much golf up this way and we kicked around a few local courses before deciding on the Olympic Course. Sunday morning is a busy time and this was one of the few courses with tee times when we wanted to play.
Gold Mountain is on the west side of the Puget Sound and from the Olympia/Tacoma area (where we stayed) it was an easy drive. However, from Seattle you’d either have to take a car ferry or go out of your way to get here. Depending on traffic that could make for a long day!
Compared to our round at Chambers Bay the day before, Gold Mountain provided that traditional Pacific Northwest backdrop with the hilly terrain and all of those beautiful evergreen trees. The course is cut through the coastal mountains and I suspect the beautiful piece of property is one of the reasons that the Olympic Course gets ranked as one of the top public courses in the state.
The Olympic Course was designed by John Harbottle III and it is the first time I’ve seen his name. While I’ve played a few of his courses (mostly on the West Coast) and liked them, I don’t recall much about his work from those rounds 10+ years ago.
We played the blue tees which are 71.9/135/6505 and what you’ll find here are many modern golf features. By that I mean you’ll get fairly elaborate bunkering and green complexes with an incredible amount of sculpture. The greens themselves are small and with the land movement I found it tough to get my distance just right for birdie putts. For a wooded course I thought there was plenty of width and another positive is that the yardages of the holes varied greatly.
The front nine is solid, however the back nine is where I thought the Olympic Course’s best holes were found. The 12th and the closing stretch (the 15th through the 18th) are all great holes! The 12th is a downhill par-3 and played 227 from the blue tees. For such a long hole the green is small and guarded by bunkers. I’m not sure there will be many pars on the 12th!
The 15th and 16th play over a pond and you have views of each hole from the other one. The greens are cut into a hillside and framed by Douglas firs, making those two holes the most scenic on the Olympic Course. Then, the 17th and 18th are closing par-4’s that are quite different. The 17th is 439 yards while the 18th is only 271 yards. Someone in our group drove it to 10 feet on the 18th!
We paid $80 to walk which seems reasonable for a weekend round on a top public course. The conditions were soft (quite the opposite of Chambers Bay) and we didn’t get much roll. As you’ll see in the pictures everything was lush and a beautiful green color. The fairways were full, rough was thick and the greens were speedy and pure.
Unfortunately, what wasn’t speedy was the pace of play! If you read reviews of Gold Mountain you’ll find many comments about the slow rounds here. And, you can add my experience to those. As a foursome we waited on every shot and it ended up being an almost 5 hour round (too long).
I think the Olympic Course is a good modern design and I’d put it on your list of public courses to try in Seattle. Personally, I could have done with a quicker round and more gently contoured greens.
Course Pictures (click any picture to scroll through the gallery):