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Circling Raven Golf Club might just as well be named Circling Vulture, given the way it picked clean the thinly fleshed bones of my golf game recently.
It's difficult to be grumpy, though, when playing the North Idaho course, which is owned by the Coeur d'Alene Tribe and located just south of the tribe's Coeur d'Alene Casino Resort Hotel, in Worley, along U.S. 95. The 7,189-yard, links-style layout is just too spirit-lifting-appropriately so, since it's named after a great leader in tribal lore-to provide a good setting for the usual venting of frustration at one's golfing inadequacies.
In my case, nothing could sour my mood-not a pulled shot into some trees off the first, tee, not taking three strokes to get out of a bunker on the 18th, and not the countless errant shots and a few lost balls in between.
To the contrary, I spent much of my time marveling-as on my first visit there last August - at the sheer beauty and chal. lenging design of the course, and clearly not enough time concentrating on my stance, grip, and swing.
This time around, with temperatures just beginning to warm up, the course and surrounding terrain obviously weren't as green and lush yet as last summer, but the course nevertheless was in fine shape overall, and it had the same allure.
The par-72 layout meanders through a 620-acre mix of grasslands, woodlands, and wetlands. Matched with wellmanicured greens and 60 beautifully contoured and sometimes devilishly placed white-sand bunkers, it's enough to make unworthy weekend hackers like me want to reach at least briefly for a camera rather than a five iron.
"It has an impact on your spirit," gushes Bob Bostwick, the tribe's spokesman. "It's the kind of course where you get out there and don't want to leave."
Bostwick- plays the course regularly, both for business and pleasure, and sports an impressive 11 handicap to show for itsomething he didn't bother to inform me of before offering to join me on my recent outing there, for...