As on traditional links land in Scotland, the birthplace of golf, these courses along the California coastline gently undulate with low hills and dunes left overgrown with native grasses. They are generously watered by creeks, natural ponds and estuaries rich with wildlife, and always, they are windswept and subject to unpredictable marine weather.

On this rugged edge of the continent the sun comes and goes, chasing away fingers of fog in the mornings, glimmering across wildflowery bluffs, and turning fiery red as it sinks into the horizon behind rocky sea stacks offshore, a daily performance of weather and landscape unmatched in its drama anywhere else on earth.

A northern outpost, a three-hour drive from San Francisco, the Sea Ranch is a rustic resort and lodge known for a unique architectural style of shed-roofed, driftwood-hued buildings half hidden in fields of native grasses. The Sea Ranch Golf Links, for years a jewel of a nine-holer, was recently expanded to eighteen. Course architect, Robert Muir Graves, planned this design for the bluffs and meadows of Sea Ranch more than twenty years ago. He said, "This is the closest I've ever come to a true links course and it reminds me of Scotland every time I look at it.

"As on true Scottish links land, we incorporated forced carries, where wild vegtetation or a natural hazard is allowed to cross or encroach upon the fairway. The rough is natural and left unmowed, right up to the edge of the fairways. Depending on the growth each year, this does not always make me a popular person."

The 8th and 9th holes run along a windy clifftop. From here, you can spot whales spouting a few thousand yards offshore, from November through March, migrating to and from Baja, California, where they spend the winter. There is plenty of sand, knee-high rough and several lakes, natural creeks and gullies, and groves of mature pines and cypress. A deep gulch runs parallel to the 16th hole and onto the 17th, a par three where the sea breezes can affect club selection, by two or three clubs. Deer wander down from the forest above, and serenely observe the golfers on the 18th.

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