Shooting for the Stars

New valley golf course slated to open July 1st.

BY THOMAS DEWELL

Tom Fazio helped redesign Augusta National Golf Club, home to the Masters Tournament, and Oakmont Country Club in Pennsylvania, host to the U.S. Open a record eight times. And Fazio made headlines when he fashioned lush Shadow Creek near dry Las Vegas.

One of Fazio’s latest projects, Shooting Star in Teton Village, is scheduled to open July 1. The architect and his team took 254 acres of flat pasture with no trees and created a golf course featuring five lakes, one pond, and something relatively uncommon in Jackson Hole: holes featuring significant elevation changes. The new course is covered with 2,500 aspen, cottonwood, spruce, and pine trees and is designed to resemble the glacial moraines in nearby Grand Teton National Park.

“I think Shooting Star will be accepted as one of the great new courses in golf, and we’re very excited about it,” Fazio says.

Golf course designers tend to have philosophies that guide their work. Robert Trent Jones Sr., for example, is associated with the saying “hard par, easy bogey.” Other designers build signature holes or ensure their courses have unforgettable finishing holes.

“Our goal in design is distinctive, unique, individual, separate types of golf holes that have never been done before,” Fazio says. “How do we do that? We just work at it.”

The valley’s fifth course, Shooting Star sits between densely developed Teton Village and Highway 390, a busy road that serves the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort and a Grand Teton National Park entrance. The golf course terrain is designed to make golfers feel isolated from the busy surroundings. Many holes are framed by mountain views, and development is along edges of the course.

The eighteen-hole course features five sets of tees. From the front tees, the course stretches a modest 5,123 yards; from the back tees, golfers must negotiate 7,373 yards. In accordance with most Fazio courses, many fairways are a generous forty-five yards wide.

“In our interviews with prospective members, Tom’s courses were praised for being fair, playable for all ability levels, yet still challenging for the best players,” says John Resor, president of Shooting Star and a member of the family that has owned land near Teton Village for three generations.

A Shooting Star golf membership costs $140,000, but goes down to $120,000 for those who own property in the development. Through mid-February, Shooting Star had sold thirty-seven lots and all but one of eighteen “cabins” were under contract. The average price for a cabin was $4.5 million. Shooting Star also will offer sports and social memberships, but prices for those had not been set as of spring. Members will be able to enjoy a clubhouse designed by the firm Hart Howerton. The facility will feature a spa, fitness center, restaurant, lap pool, two hot tubs, fire pit, and lawn.

Stipulations built into county regulations require that the course be open to locals.

“Local non-members will be able to play on Tuesday afternoons with a green fee of fifty dollars in 2009 and 45 percent of the prevailing rate from 2010 on,” Resor says.

“Shooting Star is a well-planned residential community on a spectacular site with great views, access to skiing and other recreational opportunities, and is less than two miles from Grand Teton park,” Resor says, underscoring the development’s unique and special attributes in a valley already teeming with high-end amenities.