Sheep Ranch began as a regret. In the early 1990s, Phil Friedmann declined to invest in his friend Mike Keiser's improbable plan to build an ultra-remote golf resort. Keiser was also his partner in the recyclable greeting-card business, and the resort became Bandon Dunes. Friedmann soon wished he had said yes. So he persuaded Keiser to join him in a second chance, and early in the new millennium they bought roughly four hundred acres of cliffside ground from Pacific Power and Light, just north of where Old Macdonald would later rise. They had no fixed plan. It was a bet on the land itself. The land had already defeated one ambition. In the 1970s an owner tried to make it a wind farm, and the weather was so severe that the windmills broke. It was too windy for windmills. Anyone walking out onto Sheep Ranch should carry that fact like a jacket. Around 2000, while Pacific Dunes was being built, Tom Doak and his crew, with Don Placek and Jim Urbina playing important roles, roughly shaped around a dozen holes and thirteen greens on the windswept site. The corridors were barely maintained, and there was no irrigation system. Caretakers watered the greens by hooking retired fire engines to the water main. There was no set routing. Players invented their own, teeing up wherever they liked and aiming at whichever green caught their eye. Thoughts of turning it into a private eighteen-hole course faded once the owners learned that local people objected. So for years it stayed a kind of secret, open to those at the resort who were in the know. Doak called the experience "transcendent." It was wonderful, but it was not a business. In the second half of the 2010s, with the property absorbed into Bandon Dunes, plans took shape for a proper course. Many in the industry expected Doak or Gil Hanse to get the job. Keiser instead called back Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw to replace Doak's free-roaming layout with a regulation one. Yet they kept an eye on what earlier hands had left behind. An old road called Whiskey Run Lane once ran along the edge of the bluffs. Coore and Crenshaw used some of its earthworks to form the central spine of the 15th green, one of the most eccentric and memorable contours at the resort. Doak's crew had dug a sand quarry in the northeast corner to build the original greens. The new architects knocked down one of its walls and set the 11th green inside. It is hard to imagine anyone dreaming that up from scratch. The new Sheep Ranch opened in 2020. Nine of its greens sit against the bluffs, using a full mile of ocean shoreline. The holes do not simply march along the coast. They weave in and out of small peninsulas, so some tee shots fly out over the cliffs. "You can play diagonally across the ocean away from the promontories that jut out toward the ocean, which you can't do from any of the other courses," Coore said. "The ability to watch your tee shot go, literally, over water and over a cliff, instead of just along the water... The key was how best to use the shoreline." There are no sand bunkers. Instead there are twenty or so grassy depressions with a natural, abandoned look. The result is rugged, sporty, open and adventurous. Making golf playable on a compact property in such blustery conditions is a large part of why Coore and Crenshaw are so admired. The resort once considered a fire-truck theme for the logo, in honor of those old engines. It chose a minimalist shepherd's crook instead. Either would have fit. One recalls the improvised years when greens were watered from a hose, and the other recalls the name the windswept ground still carries.