The Million Dollar Golf Course

Almost everyone who remembers playing Juneau's Million Dollar Golf Course mentions "oiling the greens."

• Photos

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Whoever heard of putting oil on grass? And as the photographs show, nothing much of anything green grew on Juneau's golf course, which was located on mine tailings just off Thane Road. The golf course operated from the early-1960s through the late-1970s.

The whole business of golfing there was the reversal of what's normal, said Mike Grummett, who served as vice president of the Sandblasters, the volunteer group that maintained the course. The "fairways," normally grass, were sand interspersed with occasional rocks; and the little grass that grew - tall beach grasses - were the traps, Grummett said.

"Everything possible was done to simulate grass," he said.

That meant using a light coat of oil to firm up the sand. The sand was so fine in places that a putted golf ball would leave a trail. The oil also made the fairways darker than the rest of the sand, which made them stand out in the distance, said Mark Notar, who worked at the nine-hole course as a 12-year-old.

"When there was a dry spell, it was like the Sahara Desert. You may or may not remember the last dry spell," said Bill Schmitz, 71. Schmitz helped establish the golf course in about 1961.

The driving force behind the course was Joe Werner, who worked for the U.S. Forest Service, said Schmitz, a partner in a local accounting firm. "He organized the group that built the course."

The "Million Dollar" tag came from the fact that the course sat atop mine tailings from the Alaska-Juneau gold mine. But no golfers ever struck gold, said Jennifer Schmitz, "unless it was a hole in one."

What golfers did strike was an occasional buried rock. With a metal golf club, that was an electrifying experience for the hands, Grummett said.

But the golf course's location had one major advantage, according to Dale Schmitz, who was able to interest his wife, Jennifer, in golf during the early 1970s.

"It had excellent drainage. Water went right through it," he said. "That's the secret to golfing in Juneau: You've got to have a place that drains."

"We played in a lot of rain, I can tell you that. I didn't have anything to compare it to because I had never seen a golf course in my life," said Jim Nielsen, 75, who grew up in Juneau and helped establish the course.

Bill Mitchell, 85, remembers golf balls careening off rocks in the fairways.

"Every time I played, it was an event,' Mitchell said.

On one particular day his golfing partner's ball hit something more than a rock and bounced high into the air.

"After that happened a couple of times we started looking around up there," he said. They found a buried steel wagon wheel. Using a grader from his heavy equipment company, Mitchell excavated an early fire suppressor.

Mitchell's heavy equipment was used for more than excavating artifacts. It was used to reshape the course, but the greens and the holes generally were kept in the same place.

"Every year you played, it was a different course," said Jennifer Schmitz, a dental assistant. "The winds switched the sand around."

During the winter the Taku winds, the tide and the rain lashed the golf course, creating gullies and ditches, building and destroying sand dunes. During the first year volunteers built a clubhouse.

"It lasted one year. The next summer just the floor was there. We didn't know what we were doing," said Nielsen, who helped start the golf course.

More than once, the clubhouse, also known as the shack, was blown into the channel, Notar said.

"At the start of each year we would go down there and clean it up," said Nielsen, who is retired from the Juneau Douglas Telephone Co.

The golf course had nine holes, so two rounds were required to complete the standard golf game of 18 holes. Every hole, except one, was a par three, according to Mitchell. Par is the average number of strokes an accomplished golfer needs to put the ball in the hole. Par for a complete game was 55 strokes.

The fine sand wasn't firm enough to hold a golfing tee (a peg that holds the golf ball), which is used each time the golfer starts on a new hole. So teeing off was done from a wooden stand with a rubber mat that the tee could be pushed into.

Putting, the short stroke used to put the ball in the hole, held its own challenges. Crankcase oil was poured on the sand to feather it, and a piece of household carpet with a rope attached was dragged, harness fashion, in a circular motion around the hole, said Mitchell. This wiped out all the footprints and golf ball trails, giving the next golfer a "clean" shot at the hole. Club rules outlawed golfing shoes because they tore up the course.

The course attracted more than a few tourists. A number of tourists were beginning to show up in Juneau, and the more ardent golfers among them would ask if there was a course, Grummett said.

"They always wanted the scorecard to show they played golf here. I think they got a kick out of seeing what we put up with," he said.

The solicitation on the back of the Sandblasters' membership card also must have interested the tourists: "These tailings are a very fine gravel, making an excellent surface to play on. It's not affected by the weather and requires minimum care. The sand greens have an unusual texture, so that it closely resembles the feel of grass. Unique - Different - Historical." Today it's difficult to tell whether this was tongue in cheek or old-fashioned spin.

Memories are a little vague on why golfing eventually came to an end on the Million Dollar Golf Course, but it probably was development, according to Schmitz.

A notice in a Juneau Empire article about 1970 shows the Sandblasters were paying the city $1 for two years' rent on the course. By the late 1970s a number of developments were taking place there, including the city sewage treatment plant. Schmitz said there was no longer enough space to play golf on.

Mac Metcalfe is a Juneau free-lance writer. He can be reached at agmet@ptialaska.net.