On Halloween 1999, fire came up off the beach below Bandon and climbed the cliffs. It stopped short of the resort's buildings and its first course, but it cleared a great deal of troublesome gorse on the ground next door. Afterward Mike Keiser and Tom Doak could walk the whole routing of what would become Pacific Dunes for the first time, and what they saw gave Keiser the confidence to go ahead. Less than two months later, construction began. The land itself asked for little help. Doak's undulating fairways are mostly as he found them. Of the 13th he said it was almost exactly as it is now when they found it, and that they only had to cap the fairway with sand so grass would grow. That hole runs along 440 yards of Pacific Ocean, with a 40-foot dune on the far side of the green. Doak's verdict was that it didn't take a genius to see it would be famous someday. He noted, with a dry wit you can almost hear, that only three other par 4s in America carry that much Pacific frontage: the 9th and 10th at Pebble Beach, and the 4th here. What a coincidence, he said, that they all turned out so well. Or maybe the setting has something to do with how much people like them. Even before ground was broken, Doak had made a bolder promise. In 1999 he said that if the first Bandon course was being compared to Pebble Beach, the second would be more like Cypress Point. It was not wildly off the mark. Like Alister MacKenzie's course on the Monterey Peninsula, Pacific Dunes wins by balance and variety rather than size. At 6,673 yards from the tips and par 71, it is no championship layout, though it is tough enough when the wind is up. The routing weaves in and out of the dunes and along the clifftops, intimate one moment and open the next, sometimes undulating and sometimes heaving. The ocean holes are the postcards, but the inland holes, especially the short par 4s, make just as strong an impression. The best of those may be the 16th, a short par 4 with a rippled fairway and a plateau green that slopes away from you, front to back. It is a real gem. The course's exacting quality has an ironic origin. Keiser had played Lost Dunes, a Doak design in Michigan, and was struck by how wild its greens were. He asked for flatter greens here. Doak resolved to keep them smaller, to let the contours around them provide the challenge, and to vary the degree of tilt within. The result is a course of smallish greens and sharp surrounding contours that places heavy demands on every approach and every recovery. Ask for gentleness, it turns out, and you may get precision instead. The design stands at least equal to its setting, which is rare on a coast this beautiful, where architecture often finishes a poor second. And there may be more to come: if the playing surfaces could be made firmer and quicker, this could be one of the world's greatest links. Pacific Dunes opened in 2001 and established Bandon as an elite multi-course destination. It made Doak a standard bearer for minimalist, neoclassical design. Unlike Cypress Point, it is open to anyone willing to make the trip and pay the green fee, which may make it the finest public course in the country. Before you tee off, look left. There lies the Punchbowl, a 100,000-square-foot putting green built by Doak and Jim Urbina in 2014 and inspired by the Himalayas at St Andrews. It is free to play, and by evening it becomes the resort's gathering place, with drinks in hand and wagers on putts.