There is an old joke about committees, the one where a camel turns out to be a horse that a committee designed. Pilgrims Run, tucked into the woods of Pierson, Michigan, is the rare place that makes the joke land the other way. It was dreamed up by a crowd, and it plays as though one patient hand drew it. The crowd belonged to Robert Van Kampen. In the early 1990s he set out to build a golf course with the help of six of his own employees, two of them his sons-in-law. Each was given three holes to design. Six people, three holes apiece, eighteen in all, each with a private idea of what golf ought to be. On paper it reads like a recipe for a course that argues with itself, a patchwork of temperaments stitched across the forest. What saved it were the two people asked to make those drawings real. Kris Shumaker, a former superintendent, received the plans and began the build. A year into construction a young architect named Mike DeVries joined the work. Together they took the group's six philosophies and blended them into a whole, adjusting in the field where the ground asked for it. The routing that carries the round through the trees came out of that partnership, laid out by Shumaker and shaped by DeVries, with DeVries working alongside the co-designers to turn their ideas into holes and a routing that flows across the land. Ridges and landforms that were once covered in trees came into the light. The course does not seem imposed on this land so much as uncovered from it. The forest gives Pilgrims Run its particular mood. Every hole sits apart, closed in by its own walls of trees, so that each one feels like a room you have entered alone. That kind of isolation can be lonely in the wrong hands, a march from one green corridor to the next until the day blurs. Here the walking itself becomes part of the pleasure. The passages from green to tee are manageable, and the only long walk comes between the eighth green and the ninth tee. Plenty of courses built in the 1990s from directions like these might have ended up unwalkable. This one gives you a walk that is not only manageable but enjoyable, a quiet stroll through the woods rather than a chore between shots. Then there are the greens, which steal the show. DeVries was given free rein over the greens and bunkers, and he used it. He built rolling greens that give each hole a face of its own, and bunkers that tie into the natural landscape, accenting the ridges, the rolls and the woodland instead of fighting them. In a forest, a bland set of greens could easily let one hole blend into the next. Here the greens do the opposite, and every approach carries a little excitement and anticipation. The surfaces help. Bentgrass covers the greens, tees and fairways, giving the public golfer a rich playing surface and letting the shaping stand out. It is a lush parkland course, a par 73, open since 1997, set on a large tract about half an hour north of a large city, and it has been entertaining golfers in the Grand Rapids area ever since. It is affordable and fun for the public to play, which is its own kind of achievement. Stand on almost any tee here and you would never guess that six different minds once claimed these holes. You would only notice the trees, the rise of the land, and a green somewhere ahead with a few secrets in it, waiting.