Before Bandon Dunes, before the name Keiser became shorthand for a certain kind of golf, there was a quiet piece of forested sand in New Buffalo, Michigan. The Dunes Club was Mike Keiser's first golf development, built a full decade before Bandon opened, and it carries the particular tenderness of a first attempt. It is a place where a man's tastes in golf can be seen taking shape on a modest scale among the trees. What he loved, at that moment, was Pine Valley. Keiser's career in golf can be read as a series of devotions. C.B. Macdonald's National Golf Links and Lido have been major touchstones for him, and in the run-up to launching Bandon he looked hard at Coore & Crenshaw's Sand Hills. But when the Dunes Club took shape, he was very much under the influence of George Crump and Pine Valley, and it shows. The course deliberately summons the look of that famous place, though it does so on a smaller scale, and there is something touching in that, like a love letter written on a single page rather than a scroll. Dick Nugent designed the original nine, and the holes move through sheltered corridors in the forested dunes. The effect is intimate, almost secretive. Long views are rare. You play inside the land rather than across it, and the world beyond the trees falls away. Over the past several years Jim Urbina has revised some of the greens, so the course is not frozen in its beginnings. It has been touched again by a careful hand, the way a cherished old house might be freshened without losing its shape. That enclosure makes one moment land with real force. When you reach the first green, turn to your right. There is Lake Michigan, the only view of the water the course will give you. You may be surprised by how close it is. You have been walking within reach of a great inland sea without sensing it, and then, for a breath, there it is. After that the lake becomes a memory you carry around the rest of the round, a quiet presence just beyond the trees. The spirit of the place is relaxed, and its attention stays fixed on pure golf. Nothing here insists on ceremony. The clearest expression of that ease is the absence of tee markers. The Dunes Club was one of the pioneers of that custom, which Ballyneal, among other courses, has since adopted. The rule is simple and a little mischievous: the player or team that won the last hole picks where the next one begins. Every round becomes a conversation between players and ground, the winner earning the right to set the next puzzle. It turns the course into a game of hospitality and gamesmanship at once. There is a purity in all of this that is easy to feel and hard to name. A course in the forested dunes, one glimpse of the lake, no markers telling you where to stand. It is golf with the ornament stripped away, played in a setting that borrows the look of a legend and brings it down to human size. The relaxed ambiance and the focus on the game itself make for a first-rate experience. Standing in those sheltered corridors, you can sense the beginning of something. The man who would go on to build Bandon Dunes started here, among the trees and sand of New Buffalo, chasing the spirit of Pine Valley and finding, along the way, a place entirely its own.