Black Forest at Wilderness Valley

Black Forest opened in 1992 as Tom Doak's second solo design and the first course to fully express his now-famous minimalist philosophy. Routed across roughly 400 acres of dense northern-Michigan evergreen and hardwood forest near Gaylord, it has no housing and gives every hole its own corridor. Rather than follow the waste-bunker fashion of the era, Doak studied the classical work of George Thomas and Alister MacKenzie on the West Coast and brought that older look back east, building more than 100 individually shaped bunkers and hand-crafted greens full of subtle, multiple breaks. Playing past 7,000 yards to a par of 73, it earned a reputation as bold, wild and demanding, and collected honors including Golf Digest recognition among the country's top new public courses.