Running Y Ranch Resort - Oregon, U.S.A.

Running Y Ranch Resort is located on the shore of Upper Klamath Lake, 10 miles west of the town of Klamath Falls in southern Oregon, not far from the California border. The 10,000-acre Running Y Ranch was formerly owned by Walt Disney's brother, Roy. Nearly 30 miles long and up to eight miles wide, the lake is the largest body of freshwater west of the Rockies. Opened in September 1997, the Running Y course was designed by the Arnold Palmer Design Company. The front nine plays through open meadow, along ten acres of wetlands, and through ponderosa pines. The back nine begins along a pond and winds through Payne Canyon. The surrounding wetlands are home to more than 250 species of birds, including sandhill cranes, pelicans, and bald eagles, with the Lower Klamath National Refuge having been established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 as the nation's first waterfowl sanctuary.

Bang On Dunes - Oregon, U.S.A.

Bandon Dunes, the resort on Oregon's remote southwest coast just north of the town of Bandon, has become a world-renowned golf destination, with two resounding links courses set in the tempestuous dunes with their tiaras of yellow flowering gorse high above the Pacific. Bandon Dunes is the brainchild of Michael Keiser, who was determined to build a low-key resort with out-of-this-world golf, and after looking at sites throughout the U.S., found his golfing nir­vana when he acquired 1,200 acres adjoining Bullards Beach State Park that had been mainly used by dirt bikers. Keiser, who had made his fortune in the greeting-card business, took a leap of faith in hiring a young, unknown Scottish golf course architect, David McLay Kidd, to design Bandon Dunes. Kidd, whose father is the course manager at Gleneagles, designed a swashbuckling course where each nine loops out to the coast and back, with deep, sod-walled bunkers and broad, rumpled fairways creating different angles of play.