DEEP CREEK LAKE BUDDY TRIP - Big Views, Houses & Fun (Golf Too!) in Western Maryland
- Dooner
- 4 hours ago
- 12 min read
Ah, the 'Boys Trip'...
We've certainly had our share of golf trips in the past decade or so, but it had been eight years since the 'Crew' had enough members to hold quorum on a true, intentional, destination boys trip. Needless to say, it was long overdue!
Now, before we get too far down the road, it's important we differentiate between a golf trip and the buddy trip. If you're the trip organizer, it is paramount to know which one of the two for which you're planning! Get it right, you could be anointed a King (or maybe even a Cardinal?). Get it wrong, and you might find yourself sleeping on the couch or air mattress.
On the golf trip - that's what you do. You golf and not much else. Thirty-six holes a day are typically mandatory and everything else is secondary. Meals are fit in where you can and rarely planned or prepared yourself. You rise early to play with a daybreak round and don't quit till the sun goes down. Veteran golf trip captains even know where to schedule a trip so that it may include a round after sunset at a course with lights!
On the buddy trip - you also golf, but it's secondary. You will plan your day around a late morning tee-time to allow for the group to sleep off the late night shenanigans, card games, campfires and cigars. Meals are planned around the grilling of assorted meats and the accommodations MUST be on point (i.e. fit everyone under one roof!).
With the overwhelming majority of the Crew living in Upstate New York, we've traditionally looked for a "meet in the middle" destination. Usually that has meant something around the Mason-Dixon Line.
We've gone the all-inclusive route, like our trip to Oglebay Resort in Wheeling, WV. However, we prefer building our own trip, like we did on our last trip to Winchester, VA, eight long years ago!
Since our last trip, we've seen a pandemic, the last couple guys in our group have gotten hitched and we think/hope everyone has finished reproducing.
These exceedingly rare trips still bring out all the old stories, but also an opportunity to reinforce - and even create new - core memories.
You play golf on a buddy trip, but there are other things just as important!
Sooooo, when it was pointed out in the group text thread it had in fact been eight years since the last true 'Loo Crew' trip, we all decided it had been long enough. I (Dooner) had actually planned this trip to be our next trip right after our last. I just didn't think it take us this long to execute said plan!
Deep Creek Lake is a four seasons resort area (not really a town - but if you're looking for one on the map, you can search for McHenry, M.D.). Most people don't think of Maryland as being mountainous (news flash, its not), but this area is about as close as it gets. You'll find the state's western border with West Virginia just a few miles from here. Google Maps puts it at a three hour drive from Washington, D.C. or Baltimore, but only two hours from Pittsburgh. Morgantown, W.V. is an even hour away.
Sooooo, what about the golf?
The area's most well-known course is Lodestone. This Hale Irwin highlands course is usually listed among the best public courses in The Old Line State. It is part of the Wisp Resort found atop a ridge on the north end of the lake, which also offers skiing in the winter time adjacent to the slopes of it's other course, Fantasy Valley.
It was a little (maybe more like very) fortuitous that we waited awhile to visit. Thousand Acres Lakeside Golf Club opened it's original nine in the early 2000s. It likely would have made our Nine Favorite 9s list had we played it then.
We didn't, of course, but boy are we glad we waited for the second nine to be built!
Three courses might be enough for most groups to have enough variety, but the Crusade's road to 1000 can't afford too many detours or wasted opportunities to collect as many courses as possible on these rare out of town ventures. Unfortunately, a major detour hit us in the form of Lodestone being closed until later this year for some renovations/repairs.
Thankfully, Oakland Golf Club just twenty minutes southwest of the lake has a pretty enjoyable course that has long served as the host of the Western Maryland Amateur. Drive across the border from there into West Virginia and you may find Alpine Lake Resort, or further still to reach the incredibly enjoyable Preston Country Club in Kingwood. We'd previous played the latter and would highly recommend a long look at the forty-five minute drive to play a course that sits on land along the Cheat River that once belonged to George Washington!
You could also look to add a round on your way in/out depending on your route. Rocky Gap Casino on the east side of Cumberland has a nice Jack Nicklaus course we're told, but wasn't on our route this time. We took the scenic route in and hit a little nine-holer in Keyser, W.V. called Polish Pines. It was a great, quick warmup round before the boys landed in Maryland (not to mention Polish Pines has the most well-branded tee markers ever!).
BUT... there's one more course you can play, if you do your homework and rent a house in a specific community to get access to it and it's DYNAMITE par-3 course!
Waterfront Greens sits in a secluded valley along the eastern shores of Deep Creek Lake - that includes lake access and some massive houses in which to house your group! This is a private community and golf course - but rent a house in there and you win the lottery by getting access to this hummock-laden, Brian Ault design.
And if you know our love for courses like this, you know damn well we not only rented a house in this community, we rented to one closest to the first tee! This was one of the biggest reasons we wanted to trip here. You'll find out why later!
Sooooo, how did they play?
First off, it's a bit cooler here than the surrounding areas. It's one of the main reasons you have snow in winter for skiing and why people flock here to beat the heat in summer. Fall has to be an absolute smoke show with the leaves, so that leaves spring as the most likely 'off-season' and least desired time to visit. Do we care? No, we do not.
We did encounter some rain during parts of each day we were there, but also plenty of sunshine and mild temps. All in all, it was a great 3-day/3-night trip. As for the courses...
Thousand Acres is the area's new shining star. We started out our trip there (Thursday) in case we ran into weather, we could play it later in the weekend. Turns out, we hit a brief weather delay after a few holes. Considering six of the eight guys drove between three and six hours to tee off, it provided some added beer time in the cart barn while we waited it out. What we found before/after the rain was remarkable conditions (especially great considering some of the others we saw afterward). The front nine was the older of the two, but aside from the back's greens being a little springier thanks to their newness, you'd never be able to tell the front nine was twenty years senior the back.
Craig Schreiner gets the design credit with Bob Holcomb serving as the shaper. Schreiner designed one of our favorite courses back home in Rochester, N.Y. - The Links at Greystone. The front heads out in a straight line for five holes before making a U-turn and following the higher side of the valley back home. You are greeted by MASSIVE corridors, very undulating fairways and a classic bunker lines with pure white sand.
VIEWING NOTE: Click/tap on any photo to enlarge into gallery mode
The back nine might be even better than the superb front. A clever figure-eight routing converges two-way traffic at the 11th & 17th teeing areas. The views are tremendous, perhaps only exceeded in beauty by the excellent designs of the holes - including the 10th and 18th in your scope from the same location.
Thousand Acres added the 'Lakeside' moniker to its name in the last year or so thanks to the proximity of some of the new holes. The club isn't done yet either... a new clubhouse is on the menu for the near future.
If this is the first time you've heard of Thousand Acres Lakeside, we promise, it won't be the last. As the name suggests, they have LOTS of land to grow! If they keep this place looking like it does now, we expect the buzz to continue to mount. Rates in-season on weekends will chase $140, but we got a weekday twilight in the shoulder season for just $70. We'll take that any day!
Our second day in town was going to be Lodestone day, but as we mentioned it was closed until June 2025 (estimated opening according to resort). We headed to the base of the ski slopes to see what Fantasy Valley was all about. Unfortunately, it was a non-sensical mess of a golf course. Among the 600+ courses we've now played, this was a rare that just left you scratching your head.
Yes, it had rained the night before so the starter told us to play the bunkers at ground under repair. Unfortunately, the previous night's rain was not the reason they were in rough shape. They'd apparently decided to let many of the fairway bunkers go the way of the Dodo and the ones greenside weren't in much better shape.
We were greeted on the first tee with a long dogleg par-5 that plays uphill the whole second half - but you had to carry a GIANT oak tree in the middle of the fairway off the tee. It didn't get much better from there until you got to the turn.
The resort made the decision a few years back to close five holes to add more skiing options. To compensate, they built five new holes (10 - 13 and 18) using some land across the road from what is now numbers nine and fourteen. More on hole 14 in a minute.
This glimmer of hope came in the form of a very different looking design style. Our very friendly and informative starter mentioned the Lodestone crew built the new holes. It had backed up a little bit so we put the drone for a quick loop while we played the first couple holes of this course within a course. They looked great - from a far and from the air.
Once you played them, you saw the same bunker deterioration that plagued the rest of the course. We get that it rained, but it looked liked the fairways hadn't been mowed in a week (at least). We decided to play winter rules through the green because it was pretty rough all around.
That brings us back to the 14th hole. Earilier this year, we had sent in a course for @design_disasters to review on Instagram and could not wait to send this hole in. Ironically, they published a review of this very hole the day before we played it! Check out their thoughts in the embedded video...
If you're a regular visitor here or on social media, you probably know we don't like to put courses down or relay the overly negative. However, we also are obliged to paint a realistic view of what we saw (or what you may encounter if you took our advice).
That said, if you came to Deep Creek Lake on a similar trip, this course might be the one to skip - especially when Lodestone comes back online. We'll come back to play Lodestone in the next year or so hopefully, but Fantasy Valley needs help. A group rate still came in at $56ish on a Friday morning. Not crazy considering the cost of golf today, but still overpriced for the course you got.
Hopefully things improve soon for both Wisp courses.
Oakland Golf Club rounded out the trio of regulation courses in our rotation. We had scheduled an early morning round here so if some die-hards wanted to try a doubleheader with Alpine Lake they could, but we all tapped out before it even got off the ground. No matter though, as Oakland was plenty for us on an overcast morning.
Starting off on the right side of the road on what appears to be the original nine, was well cared for with new sand in most of the bunkers and lots of room to land your tee shots on most holes. The design was intentional and had some unexpected intrigue to match a little quirkiness. The greens were large and guarded often by bunkers and side hill kicks to repel misguided shots.
All of that made for a major surprise when we crossed the road to the back nine. We were greeted with a pace-of-play killing, 200 yard par-3 to a postage stamp green on the 10th. The greens did not get any larger from there, as it seemed the back nine was just added to say they had eighteen holes. The cookie-cutter, pine tree-lined parkland design did have a a couple drivable par-4s and a couple decent one-shotters. All in all, it made for a good round for our group of varying degrees of game.
It won't be the course you write home about, but you won't be disappointed you played it either. The rate north of $80 for a Saturday morning didn't scare off anybody - as the place was full well into our post-round meal at the clubhouse's Caddyshack Bar & Grill.
If you want to do a Deep Creek Lake buddy/golf trip right, pay attention to this next part. It will make your trip if you do it.
Waterfront Greens is AWESOME! We rented a house called 'Breeze Alley' from Railey Vacations. Each guy's share for the rental was only $238. Not per night - TOTAL! That of course INCLUDED the all-you-can-play golf on the par-3 course.
Personally, I could have spent an entire day just playing this thing as many times as I could. There are tons of options on each hole - before you even consider cross-country or reverse play if you had the place to yourself.
Are the conditions Augusta worthy, no. But for a walk-on experience whenever you want, play as much as you want, this is your jam. Our only regret is that we didn't play it more (weather being a negative factor the first and final nights in town).
That left us with one clear evening to get in what we came to do!
First, WG is longer than expected, so pack some long irons if you're carrying a Sunday Bag. There is no pro shop and no score cards were left in the mailbox. Again, no one but the residents and renters of this 102 home community are able to play it! We probably saw at most two or three groups out there at any one time.
Our first spin came as twilight set in on night two. There are no formal teeing grounds, but each hole has a true fairway that splits at the start, providing at least a suggested A & B option (one shorter, one longer). In our two-man game, we packed a single bag with both players wedges, putters and a couple irons (you'll need some longer clubs!). Loser of the hole had to carry the bag for the next hole. Winner of the hole got to determine teeing location on the next shot as well.
No rangefinders, GPS, scorecards or yardage markers. Just you and your game!
Soooooo FUN! Take a look...
Then came the Genesis of an idea we had at our Camper Golf Trip back in February. We had tested some spot lights and headlamps and decided there was a good enough visibility that we could give a homemade night golf round a go under the right conditions. While BMAC wasn't present on this trip, we put our hypothesis into action.
As a gift, we bought everyone on the trip headband visor lights (think Jordy from Star Trek: The Next Generation - if you're not old enough to understand that reference, grow up!). Next, we bought some camping spotlights and affixed them to tripods. The idea was to have three light/tripod combos lighting the way, but we only put one in play with a lantern on the flagstick. Toss in a pack of glow balls, with a different color ball for each player, and we were in business.
Pay no mind that it was past 1:00 a.m. and we had enjoyed a few beers or bourbons prior to that. Like we said, 'Boys Trip'!
We didn't hit many great approach shots, but some monster putts were holed! Happy Gilmore would have been proud!
The three hole loop ended in a putt-off between that yours truly claimed, not that it mattered. We proved the concept - now we grow it!
Also, if you think we were being loud for the hour, trust us, the rave going on a couple holes down course drowned out most of our celebrations anyway!
That's no moon. That's a Space Station.
All in all, this trip was well worth the wait. The house was great, the food was delicious, the golf was varying degrees of good for each of us considering the clubs were coming out of hibernation. We played poker, ate like kings and bet some ponies, but most of all, we utterly enjoyed being boys again.
That's what the boys trip is all about, isn't it?
Sincerely Fores,
Dooner (& The 'Loo Crew)
To view all the homes available from Railey Vacations within the Waterfront Greens community, please click here. As always, thanks to our friends at Rob Salamadia Sauce Co.
for being the ONLY CHOICE when it comes to grilling marinades! Upstate N.Y. travels in a bottle wherever we go!
Courses Played on the Deep Creek Trip
#605 - Polish Pines
#606 - Thousand Acres
#608 - Fantasy Valley
#609 - Waterfront Greens
#610 - Oakland
(*BMAC was simultaneously playing course #607 in South Carolina while we were at Thousand Acres. We do NOT miscount courses!)
Had to get this in... Polish Pines tee markers & logo are so on the nose & amazing!
The fact that the course is found in town and essentially is in the back of a strip mall just makes us smile!