The drive is long on purpose. From Highway 17 a road could have climbed straight up the bluff, short and cheap, but it would have cut through ground too good to waste on asphalt. So David McLay Kidd advised the Gebbers family to build something else: a road four and a half miles long that loops up from the highway and around the back of the property. By the time you step out of the car you have been made to wait, and the best views are saved for the walk toward the course. A sandy mesa falls away three hundred feet to the Columbia River Valley, near where the Okanogan meets it, and across the top of that mesa runs Gamble Sands. This is orchard country. The Gebbers family have long been known in Brewster and well beyond it for apples and cherries, and they had little to do with golf until they watched the rapid success of Bandon Dunes. A pure golf experience, they understood, could draw people a long way to a remote place. They set aside around 120 acres of a 1,000-acre tract and, in the early 2010s, hired the architect who had built Bandon's first course. Kidd came to this bluff at a turning point. Tetherow and the Castle Course at St Andrews had left him with a reputation for difficult, overcooked golf. Here he turned around. The fairways are forgiving and run firm and fast. The fescue greens are massive, and their contours tend to help. The risk-and-reward choices are clear-cut: take the risk or don't, and know what each one costs. The budget, said to be only two million dollars to build and grass the holes, was small for eighteen, but pure sand made it go further. There was no drainage to fight. What lies off the short grass is desert scrub and long, snaking bunkers of native sand, so you will not be left hunting for a ball in knee-high rough. One main canyon cuts through the property, yet you face only two short forced carries over desert washes. The course is not toothless, though, and that keeps the pleasure from feeling cheap. The short par fours at the 2nd, 8th and 12th are a joy. The 6th is a double-dogleg par five with a blind tee shot. The 13th, another par five, is wickedly contoured, with two huge bunkers along its right side. The hardest of the par threes plays downhill and measures 265 yards from the back tees, with a bailout short and right for anyone who cannot carry it all the way to the green. There is just enough bite here to make a lower-than-usual score feel like an accomplishment. Walking is encouraged, and Kidd first pictured Gamble Sands as walking-only. Then he spent some hot summer days on the mesa and saw that carts would be a necessity. The resort opened with a small fleet that could not keep up with demand, and today most players ride. There are no restrictive cart paths to stay on, so those who ride are free to wander. Nick Schaan, who first worked for Kidd at Huntsman Springs in Idaho, now known as Tributary, played a key role in the build and is now a partner in the firm. The design delighted many everyday golfers, Mike Keiser among them, and Keiser soon asked Kidd to build the second course at Sand Valley. In 2020 the firm added Quicksands, a fourteen-hole short course. While it was being built, Kidd described it as something that would "spill out of the clubhouse and meander across some fantastic sand hills before returning to the clubhouse." That seems the right way to think of the whole place: golf that leaves the clubhouse, wanders over the sand, and brings you back pleased.