Silver Lakes, Alabama

Loudspeakers ruined our round at Silver Lakes

This was the first course on our RTJ Trail trip and the tone was set before we even reached the golf course.

We flew into Atlanta and drove west towards Gadsden, which is where Silver Lakes sits, in the northeast corner of Alabama. About an hour from the airport. The plan was to find a decent hotel nearby, get a good night's sleep, and hit the course fresh in the morning. The problem is there are no decent hotels nearby. We ended up at a Fairfield Inn in Gadsden that I can only describe as a roadside motel. It was in the middle of nowhere, the kind of place where you park right in front of your door and wonder if you should bring your clubs inside for the night. For every other stop on the RTJ Trail we managed to find proper accommodation. This was the exception and it caught us off guard. If you're planning to play Silver Lakes on your trip, just know that the lodging situation is the weakest link. Budget your expectations accordingly.

But the golf. The golf made up for it.

Silver Lakes has 36 holes across three separate nines called the Heartbreaker, the Backbreaker, and the Mindbreaker. There's also a par-3 Short Course that wraps around Lee's Lake. Robert Trent Jones Sr. and Roger Rulewich designed it all in 1993. The names are not marketing fluff. They are warnings.

We played the Heartbreaker and Backbreaker combination, which is apparently what most people choose, and then the Short Course after lunch. The setting is completely different from the other Trail courses we played later in the trip. This is Appalachian foothill country. Pine forest, hardwood, wetlands. The course feels like it was carved out of wild land rather than constructed on top of it. Everything rolls. The terrain goes up and down constantly, not in the dramatic canyon-style drops you get elsewhere on the Trail but in a steady, relentless way that means you almost never hit from a flat stance. One foot is always higher than the other. After 18 holes your legs know about it.

The greens are the headline act. Champion Ultradwarf surfaces, widely considered the best on the entire Trail, and I would not argue with that. They were fast and true with subtle breaks that only reveal themselves once you're already committed to your line. Nearly every green sits elevated above the fairway, some of them 30 or 40 feet up, which means your approach has to fly in high and land soft. Anything that comes in low and running bounces off the front slope and tumbles back down. We learned that lesson early and started adding a club on every approach. Sometimes two.

The Heartbreaker nine saves its teeth for the end. The first few holes are fair and let you settle in but the closing three along Lee's Lake are brutal. The 9th is a 450-yard par 4 with water running down the entire left side. You cannot relax on that hole. The Backbreaker has its own nasty moments. The 7th is a par 5 stretching to 623 yards with water in play twice. I still don't know how that hole is supposed to work. You just survive it and move on. Both nines finish with demanding carries over water so by the time you walk off the last green your nerves are properly cooked.

The Short Course deserves its own paragraph because it is not what you expect from a par-3 layout. Water on seven of the nine holes. Same Ultradwarf greens. Real elevation changes. Some of these holes would fit comfortably on the championship nines. We played it after lunch almost as an afterthought and it ended up being one of the more memorable parts of the day.

Now. I need to talk about what happened on the course that day because this was our introduction to something I was not prepared for and which ended up following us across the entire trip.

We got paired with two guys. They arrived with their wives, who were not playing, and a picnic basket. Fine. Nice day out, bring the family, enjoy the weather. Then I saw the speakers. Not one. Two. Two large JBL Bluetooth speakers, one installed in each of their carts. Before we even teed off I could hear rap music coming from both carts like some kind of mobile sound system.

After the first hole I'd had enough. Luckily there was nobody behind us on the course so we told them to go ahead and we would follow at a distance. They were happy to oblige and for the first nine holes it worked. We had our peace. They were a few holes ahead, the music faded into the trees, and we could actually enjoy the golf.

Then they stopped for drinks in the bar between nines.

We passed them on the course and suddenly they were right behind us again. For the last nine holes, on several occasions, they pulled up to the green of the hole next to our tee box. So there we were, standing on the tee trying to concentrate, and from maybe 40 yards away comes rap music blaring from two speakers at full volume. There was no marshal on the course to deal with it. Nobody from the staff came around. We just had to live with it.

I wrote about this loudspeaker problem in my Ross Bridge review already and I will keep writing about it because someone needs to say it out loud. This is becoming a cancer in American golf culture. I go to a golf course to hear birds and wind and the sound of a well-struck iron. I do not go to listen to someone else's playlist from the next fairway. The fact that courses allow this and that there is seemingly no enforcement anywhere on the Trail is baffling to me. At Silver Lakes there was not even a marshal presence to ask. We were completely on our own.

This was the worst loudspeaker encounter of the trip although the one at Ross Bridge was annoying too and there will be more to tell on other courses. The thing that made Silver Lakes especially absurd was the scale of it. Two speakers. A picnic. Wives in the cart. This was not golf for these guys. This was a tailgate party that happened to involve hitting balls.

All of that said. Silver Lakes is phenomenal golf. It might be the best pure golfing experience on the RTJ Trail. The conditioning is outstanding, the routing through the Appalachian landscape is beautiful, and the greens are world class for a public course. It costs somewhere between $45 and $65 for 18 holes with a cart. Compare that to $150 at Ross Bridge. For raw quality of golf per dollar spent, nothing else on the Trail comes close. Golf Digest named it one of the best value public courses in the country and after playing it I completely agree.

One warning. The rough is vicious. Any ball that leaves the fairway by more than a few yards vanishes into thick fescue and native grass. We lost more balls here than at any other course on the trip. Bring extras. More than you think.

Silver Lakes is not the glamorous stop on the RTJ Trail. The hotel situation is bad, the clubhouse is functional rather than fancy, and on our visit we had to share the course with what felt like a country music festival on wheels. But the actual golf is as good as it gets on public land in Alabama. If I could only go back to one course on the Trail, this might be it. Just bring earplugs along with the extra balls.