Some courses announce themselves at the first tee. The Loop at Forest Dunes prefers to wait, and then it turns around and shows you its other face. The ground lies in the sandy, remote country of northern Michigan's lower peninsula, about nine miles from Roscommon. It has passed through curious hands over the years: William Durant, one of the founders of GM; the Detroit Partnership; the Michigan Carpenters Pension Fund. A private club opened here with a Tom Weiskopf course in 2002. In 2011 the Arkansas businessmen Lew Thompson, who had made his fortune in long-haul trucking, and Sam Mathias bought the place and opened it to the public. Thompson built a lodge and went looking for a way to make guests stay longer than a night. He found it in a notion Tom Doak had carried for most of his career. "This is a concept I have thought about for 30 years," Doak said. "You need the right site and the right client to understand the appeal of it. At Forest Dunes we finally have both." The idea is older than Doak. The Old Course at St Andrews was once played both clockwise and counterclockwise, its great double greens allowing either, until 1870, when the counterclockwise loop became the preferred routing. Doak, a student of golf history, had found the concept of two courses in one outlined in Tom Simpson's "The Architectural Side of Golf," and had always wanted to build one of his own. When Doak first laid his plan on the table, Thompson said something to the effect that it looked like a nice course, but he was not wowed. Doak then revealed a second drawing of what appeared to be the very same course. After a moment of silence, Thompson understood he was looking at two courses in one. It needed gentle land. Too much elevation and one direction of a hole becomes too extreme to play. This parcel is rumpled but never dramatic, sandy and subtly undulating, interesting without being severe. Brian Slawnik, one of Doak's senior associates at Renaissance Golf Design, developed the course in one direction while Doak designed the other. The result opened in 2016: eighteen greens, eighteen fairways, thirty-six holes. Played clockwise it is the Black. Played counterclockwise it is the Red. Each is a par 70 with five par threes, and the club alternates them day by day, so that No. 2 today becomes No. 16 tomorrow. What you notice first is the turf. Fescue on tees and fairways, firm and fast enough to feel almost like concrete underfoot. The fairways run as wide corridors, but drive to the wrong area and the shot to the green becomes very hard. Every green sits among broad expanses of short grass, opening countless routes and club choices. A fair number of greens tilt from front to back, which on a reversible course almost has to be so. They are difficult to read but never crazy. On the Red, the 6th doglegs left to a raised green, and the par-five 9th can feel like the hardest hole on the card. The Red's 12th may be its finest. On the Black, the right-bending par-four 12th has the bearing of a signature. The Black is said to be the more difficult of the two, yet Doak sees them as near equals. "The Black has a hard start and gentler finish," he said, "the Red the more conventional softer start and tough finishing holes." His most telling answer came from the pro shop, which he asked to keep track of preferences: a large majority liked best whichever direction they played second. That is the secret of The Loop. It does not wow you on the surface. It reveals itself more with each round, and most of all the second day, when the ground you learned yesterday comes back at you from the other way. Doak called it one course with a lot more variety than most. And on the 31st of the month, whether in every month that has one or in May, July and August, Forest Dunes holds a two-person better-ball event: one direction in the morning, the other after lunch. Both faces are seen in a single day, the whole easy-walking land crossed twice, the way the place was meant to be played.