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Walden On Lake Conroe Golf and Country Club
(409) 448-4668 |
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 TOUGHEST PAR 5sTorture ChambersDiabolical designers come up with variety of obstacles to dish out the painYour foursome is on the tee box, and nobody wants to lead off. One guy is dragging three clubs, another is feigning a shoulder injury and the third is rubbing his rosary beads. All the other holes on the course have charming, inviting names, like Daisy Hill or Quail's Nest or Streamside. This one, for reasons obvious after a glance down the fairway, is called Satan's Revenge. You stare through a pinhole chute of wild-rose thicket. There's a 240-yard forced carry over a raging river to a doormat of short grass flanked by the sands of Iwo Jima to the left and a white picket fence of out-of-bounds stakes to the right. The triple dogleg finishes to an elevated, island green the size of your dining room table. Some par 5s stretch the limits of fairness and leave you wondering why, at some point on the hole, you weren't hitting off a waterbed and aiming through the mouth of a giant plastic clown. The overall difficulty of a par 5 does not lie exclusively in its distance, configuration or hazards, and a particular hole's poison doesn't affect everyone equally. At all skill levels, there are golfers who welcome what can politely be called "extreme challenge" and those who fear it. A hard hole isn't necessarily an unfair hole, but it's a hole that has at least one characteristic you'd change if someone turned you loose on a bulldozer for an hour. Water was a recurring theme among holes in contention to be named the area's toughest. Somewhere between tee and green, there lies either great temptation or absolute necessity to fly the ball (in a few cases farther than 200 yards) over a body of water. There is representation on the list of all the architects' tricks that make a par 5 tough -- impossible length and uncuttable doglegs, expansive bunkers and tiny greens, deep rough and blind approaches. There are more than 700 par-5 holes in the area to choose from. You can eliminate more than half because few courses are purposely designed to beat up a player on more than half its long holes. Drop half the remainder, as well, to account for holes that just don't play as hard as they might have looked on someone's drafting board. That still leaves a considerable number of choices. The 11th at Walden on Lake Conroe stands apart from the crowd by earning 11 votes from the Chronicle's panel as the most difficult par 5 in the area. No other hole received more votes in any other category. |
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fabulous sunset over Lake Conroe as taken from the Southern Empress.
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  Dave with Boogie Brooks |
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        Athletic Facilities at Conroe High School |
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  These 2 pictures are of the outside of our condo at the First Fairway at Walden. This is the only RCI resort that I know of that includes golf with your week. |
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