Beneath The Mines run miles of abandoned gypsum mines, winding under the ground just minutes from downtown Grand Rapids. The course takes its name from them, and it seems to have absorbed some of their character too. Mike DeVries laid out a round that winds the way those old passages do, turning and climbing and dropping, a journey that shows off everything this varied property has to offer. The land does not make this easy. The property is not one generous sweep of ground but three separate plots, and the routing has to stitch them together. The round begins across the road from the clubhouse with four distinctive par 4s that take on some of the most severe elevation changes on the property. It is a bracing way to start, a little like being handed the hardest chapter first. Then DeVries brings you back across to the main paddock for the fifth through the eleventh, where sand dunes rise up and a single large landform becomes the center of the story. On the ninth you play around it. On the tenth you climb up to it. On the eleventh you come back down. Three holes, one landform, three entirely different relationships with it. The sixth through eighth are where the cleverness shows most. A short par 4 and back-to-back par 3s are squeezed into a narrow, difficult corridor on the east side of the property. Yet apart from some steep walks between green and tee, you would never guess how severe the terrain beneath you really is. That is the quiet art of the place. The disjointed walks and tricky pockets of land are there, but DeVries keeps finding clever ways to make the most of them. From there the course moves to the back of the property for the twelfth through seventeenth, a heavily wooded stretch that treks up and down a large hill, with incredible green complexes waiting among the trees. Then the final walk returns you to the main section for the eighteenth, a dramatic downhill par 4 that sends you home with the ground falling away in front of you. What stays with you most, though, are the greens. They are a pleasure to play and a puzzle to score on. Almost always there is a slope that will help you and another that will turn your ball away, and knowing your position before you arrive at each complex is crucial. Even the subtler surfaces test you. On the par-4 tenth, small knobs rise from the green in a way that recalls a Maxwell roll, another way DeVries finds to ask a different question. The par-3 eleventh holds a secret that a single visit might not reveal. It has two teeing areas, set roughly 90 degrees apart, each attacking the same green from a completely different angle. Play it once and you know one hole. Come back and look at it from the other tee and you see how differently it can play. Then there is The Pit, tucked into the northwest corner of the property. It is a three-hole short course that was part of the original plan but was abandoned during construction, and today it waits there for anyone curious enough to find it. For $10, you get it to yourself for 45 minutes and can play as much as you like. That spirit runs through the whole place. A round costs no more than $72 to walk, a couple of miles from downtown. On difficult, broken-up ground above old gypsum mines, The Mines has become a model for what accessible public golf can be.