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Set deep in the mountains of South Korea, this golf course is a monumental achievement in land contouring and water management. In his concluding article about this enormous undertaking, Ken Alperstein covers what it took to go from compacted rubble to water-laced dreamscape.

Dressed for Success

A glance at our portfolio of dozens of golf-course projects dating back to 1990 shows that no two of them are exactly alike - despite the fact that our mission in each case has been exactly the same: It's our goal with every project to leave behind grassy patches that have seemingly been draped across natural terrain that has been there, untouched and untrammeled, since time immemorial. In other words, we've crafted elevation changes, watercourses, plantings and other defining features so carefully that it seems like folks who enjoy chasing little white, dimpled

Building this golf course wasn't a subtle process, notes Ken Alperstein. As he discusses in the first of a pair of articles on the project, they started by knocking over a South Korean mountain, then, after extensive contouring, began working on two heavily regulated water systems.

Moving a Mountain

We've participated in the construction of lots of great golf courses through the years, but this one was something special. It started for us at Pinnacle Design (Palm Desert, Calif.) with a call from one of the world's top golf-course architects, Ted Robinson, Jr., who let us know that we had to rush to prepare a presentation for a client in South Korea. As he explained the situation, if we couldn't win over the chairman of the conglomerate that was building the 27-hole course, the job would go to