The 45-year-old golf course at Gulf State Park in Gulf Shores, Ala., was called the Refuge. Coincidentally, that’s what it’s become: an empty, open wilderness, devoid of golf and almost anything else — left, at the moment, largely to the whims of nature.
This place’s days became numbered in 2016, when a master plan for the park included converting the golf course to some other, undetermined purpose: even then, revenue was falling hard (down more than 25 percent from 2012-2014), and perhaps as much as $10 million in improvements were needed. And that’s to say nothing of the effects of shrinking demand for golf in an area already saturated with courses. By late 2018, the course was losing money. The park quickly pulled the plug: the closure was announced in mid-November, and the course shut down less than three weeks later.
The math was straightforward. That doesn’t mean the decision was, though.
“My bias is to keep a golf course available and open to all segments of the population, but particularly this golf course,” said Gary Ellis, Gulf State Park’s spokesman (and himself a golfer). “A lot of our visitors had connections to it. I played this course as a young man and an adult. It was a difficult decision, not only as a golfer but because of our staff. But at the end of the day, it had to be a business decision. It was emotional, and it was hard, but times are hard for golf.”
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A glimpse toward the driving range at Gulf State Park’s now-shuttered Refuge Golf Course, from near where the first tee lay.
A lot has changed in Gulf Shores since 1974. When this course first opened for play, about 60,000 people lived here in Baldwin County; today, that figure is closer to 220,000, a growth of more than 250 percent (as a whole, Alabama’s population has grown by about 42 percent over the same period). Beach development changed the economic profile of the area. Throw the golf development boom of the 1980s and 1990s into the mix — Craft Farms opened in 1987; Kiva Dunes and Peninsula followed in 1995 — and over time, the loveably scruffy state park course found itself surrounded by perfectly green, high-end competitors and cash-flush golfers willing to pay for the pleasure.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that Gulf State Park’s course fell into disrepair — it was fine, but it certainly wasn’t flawless. So it found itself caught in golf course Purgatory: unable to charge exorbitant greens fees because of its mission, and therefore unable to keep up with the quality being charged by the new signature courses. Then came the bursting of the golf bubble: across the region, rounds played are flat at best, Ellis said. Meanwhile, the course got older and needed millions of dollars in renovations — with no realistic hope of generating that kind of cash flow. Thus began its long, slow march toward December 2018.
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A bunker at Gulf State Park’s defunct Refuge Golf Course, its surface otherwise fairly smooth and playable, but for a coming invasion of dollarweed,
It is an eerie thing to walk a golf course that has been left for dead. This is not my first time to be alone on a golf course, nor is it my first time on one that is badly overgrown. But there is something different about this place. It is frighteningly quiet. It is lonely, abandoned. Everything is silent, so I keep silent too. The park’s administrators allowed me to be here, but still I feel like I am trespassing — like I should not be here, like no one should be here.
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The 18th green at Gulf State Park’s Refuge Golf Course, its putting surface dead and taking on native vegetation.
By appearances, the greens were the first things to go. They’re dead, and they look like they’ve been dead for a while. Under the hot July sun, they are brown and shriveled, hard as a rock. Lots of low-lying weeds have moved in; some of them are dead already, too. I look for the last hole that was cut here, or at least for a sign of it. But there’s nothing.
Trees and cart paths — cracks in which are now filled with grass — generally define the old playing corridors; but even so, it is difficult to tell where the fairway lines once were. Even smack-dab in the middles of the corridors, the grass is two or three inches deep. As I walk, I find my eyes repeatedly returning to a spot a few steps ahead, scanning for snakes. I never see one.
In contrast to the overgrown fairways and long-dead greens, though, the sand traps are an anomaly: they look like they could be played out of today. The course is surrounded almost completely by pine forest; I assume that the trees keep the wind down, which presumably keeps sand from blowing out. Throw in some rain every now and then, and you’ve got a fairly smooth surface with nary a rake in sight. Even with the invasion of dollarweed, I’ve seen much worse.
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Fairway lines at the defunct Refuge Golf Course at Gulf State Park in Alabama are difficult to discern now. The grass is a few inches high everywhere; rough and former fairway bleed together.
In fairness, the park isn’t allowing the course to return to nature fully. Until a permanent use for the space is decided, the plan is to mow every few weeks so that the grass doesn’t go to seed. Nothing has been decided yet, but among the possibilities, the odds-on favorite seems to be some sort of hiking-friendly nature preserve: the park’s master plan suggests using cart paths as hiking trails, and when I spoke to Ellis, he mentioned the same thing.
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I played here twice: in 2012, I think, and again in 2014 or so. The $50 greens fee was too high, but the course wasn’t bad. The land in this region is obnoxiously flat; if not for the nearby coastline and the tourists, no one in their right architectural mind would choose this land for golf. Still, the course was enjoyable, playable, and walkable — short, but in a good way; I always thought it would be a good place to play hickory clubs. I assumed I’d get around to that at some point. Assuming can get you into trouble.
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The Refuge, like a half-dozen or so other golf courses in this area, was designed by Earl Stone. When Stone died in 2016, his obituary noted his pride that none of his courses had ever gone bankrupt.
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