Bandon Trails begins with the ocean in view and then, quite deliberately, walks away from it. From the opening dunes the golfer looks southwest toward the Pacific and the long sweep of Bullard's Beach State Park, and for a moment the course seems ready to be another seaside romance. Instead Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw lead you inland, into meadow and then into woodland that feels like rain forest, before bringing you home through the sand again. It is a round shaped like a journey out and back, and that shape is the whole argument of the place. That argument mattered when the course was built. It was the third course at Mike Keiser's Bandon Dunes resort, and it had to stand toe-to-toe with David McLay Kidd's Bandon Dunes and Tom Doak's Pacific Dunes. Trails had no ocean frontage. It had to give guests a reason to stay a second night, and it had to draw the full potential out of land that could not offer the obvious thrill. When it opened in June 2005, the answer was plain. The resort did not depend on the shoreline. It could explore other landscapes too. Keiser, who was working with Coore and Crenshaw for the first time, liked what he saw. He and his sons have since built Bandon Preserve, Sand Valley, the Sandbox and Sheep Ranch with them. The name suits the ground. Long before Keiser owned it, the property was crossed by trails, some worn by people and some by animals. Coore prefers to route a course on foot rather than over a topographical map, and he used those old paths often. Partly in tribute, the architects put real artistry into the trails that link one hole to the next. There are three links-like holes in the dunes, eight in the meadow and seven threading through the trees. Each group has its own plants and its own ecosystem, among them manzanita and kinnikinnick, shore pine, huckleberry and salal. Fescue and colonial bentgrass tie every tee, fairway and green together. The meadow holes have a strong claim to being the heart and soul of the course. Yet the bunkers may stay with you longest. Where the neighboring courses let their bunker edges grow shaggy, here the grass is mown right to the boundary, and the shapes read artful and sculpted. The feel carries something of Spyglass Hill, something of Formby, and perhaps something of the sand belt west of London. The 14th is the feature hole. It is only 330 yards, a par four that starts on a high, panoramic tee and plunges more than 100 feet to a fairway that tilts steeply to the right. Caution means the left side. Miss right and you face a blind approach at the shallowest angle into the smallest green on the course. The people who built it belong in the story as well. Dave Axland ran construction. Tony Russell, Jim Craig, Jimbo Wright, Jeff Bradley and a young Dave Zinkand shaped greens and bunkers, and it would be hard to name a more gifted crew. Russell, a Bandon local and former dairy farmer, has had a hand in building every course at the resort. At Trails his job was clearing trees along the center lines of the corridors. On the 10th he veered left by accident, and the architects had to change their plans. Coore jokingly named him a design associate, telling him, "You're going to have to share the blame." The crew had hats made reading "Coore & Crenshaw & Russell." That seems right for Bandon Trails. It is a course that came from walking the land and listening to it, and its makers were willing to let a crooked clearing change the plan.