That’s because Cannon Beach has an array of beguiling attractions for foodies, craftspeople and naturalists – amateur or pro – and there isn’t any golf in town.
But you can find golf nearby and a little more distant, and if the trip winds down on the way home with a round at Pumpkin Ridge in North Plains, 20 miles west of Portland, you’ve had about the best of all tourism worlds.
From Cannon Beach, which is about 150 miles from Olympia by way of Longview, Astoria and Seaside, the nearest top-flight 18-hole course is Gearhart Golf Links.
Gearhart, a dozen miles from Cannon Beach, was opened in 1892, which makes it the oldest course in the Northwest. Its clubhouse, which replaced the one that burned down in 1997, includes the Sand Trap restaurant, run by McMenamins, the same people who re-did The Spar in downtown Olympia (for better or worse).
If you’re playing only two courses on your trip, Gearhart should be one, and Pumpkin Ridge – one of the Northwest’s great golf courses – should be the other.
If you cede the southern Oregon coast to the four courses of Bandon Dunes Resort, then Pumpkin Ridge – not without challengers – rules northern Oregon.
Pumpkin Ridge’s two Bob Cupp-designed courses opened in 1992. By 1993, the Nike Tour Championship was played at Ghost Creek, Pumpkin Ridge’s public course, and it landed there again in 1994.
The U.S. Amateur was played at Witch Hollow, the private course, in 1996, the year a golfer named Tiger Woods won his third straight Amateur championship.
The U.S. Women’s Open was played at Witch Hollow in 1997 and again in 2003. In 2006, the U.S. Women’s Amateur was at Witch Hollow.
And this Aug. 19-22, the LPGA Safeway Classic will be at Ghost Creek.
On the course at Ghost Creek, there is challenge enough for anyone and a topography that won’t remind you of any other course, try as you might to think of one.
The public venue is named for the skinny creek that winds along and across it and into play throughout most of the golf course, popping up like a ghost when you least expect it.
And the rough … it’s sticky. A Pumpkin Ridge member on the course last week called it “Velcro rough.”
“I think you’ll find our rough is generally quite a bit longer than most golf courses,” said Ryan Clemens, the head PGA professional at Pumpkin Ridge.
The rough is especially long right now after the persistently moist spring in the Northwest, said Clemens, a 27-year-old graduate of Stadium High School in Tacoma and the Professional Golf Management program at New Mexico State University.
“Certain areas of the golf course have been challenging to get a mower on,” Clemens said. “That plays into the design of the golf course – the rough does penalize you a little more than most rough.
“You literally find yourself adjusting clubs and clubbing up. You don’t find that at most public venues.”
This particular golf road trip ended up in the wilds of Pumpkin Ridge on Thursday, the first day of the U.S. Open in Pebble Beach, Calif. It wasn’t such a stretch, on this championship golf course, to feel like we were playing U.S. Open rough.
THE ROAD THROUGH CANNON BEACH
The guy has a way with fennel-crusted pork. And who could have known that the basil-infused olive oil drizzled on the handmade sorbet on top of the crme fraiche and strawberries over the orange-scented scone would be just the final touch to the shortcake?
The setting was EVOO in Cannon Beach. EVOO (the letters stand for “extra virgin olive oil”) is a cooking school where chef Bob Neroni and his wife, Lenore Emery, put on dinner shows most nights.
Bobby Flay’s got nothing on Chef Bob. The night of our visit to EVOO was a Family Market Dinner, which meant that virtually all of the ingredients came from the farmer’s market in town.
Center Diamond is a world-class fabric and quilting store on the main drag in Cannon Beach. Next door is Icefire Glassworks, where renowned glass artists James Kingwell and Suzanne Kindland offer daily demonstrations in the studio built specifically for the glass-blowing art.
Part of the vibe of Cannon Beach is its pride in not being Seaside.
Some golf roadies, like maybe you, might lean more toward a fried seafood platter than a gourmet dinner show. You might not need much of anything at the fabric store. And the tufted puffins, newly arrived at Haystack Rock, might not tempt you to squint through a telescope to see them.
So therefore you might think Seaside, in all its penny-arcade splendor, is pretty OK for a place to lay your head between rounds. They’ve got beer there, right?
Pumpkin Ridge could fit just as nicely into a Portland-based golf trip. Portland, without question, is a great golf city.
But Portland, a city of many other virtues, is not Cannon Beach, where the cosmopolitan experience goes to the shore.
LESSON LEARNED
I learned a lesson last week on writing about recently deceased friends of the game: Always check in with the family, no matter how much you think the obituary is the final authority.
It’s the things that aren’t in the obituary that can hurt. Nancy Larson Rawlings, Howard Larson’s daughter, took issue with an account of “moonshine” at a dinner that her father threw for the Scott Lake men’s club in the 1970s.
According to Mrs. Rawlings, the alcohol was legal, served legally with a banquet permit behind locked doors at a private dinner assisted by members of the club’s Twilight League.
I sincerely apologize to family members for not including them in the research from the beginning.
Contributing writer Bart Potter can be reached at greygoatee06@comcast.net.
