Course Profiles / Idaho

Tributary: A Course Profile

The par 4 16th tees off facing directly at the Grand Teton. Plenty of courses claim a mountain view. Tributary, in Driggs on the Wyoming side of the Teton Valley conversation, put the most famous peak in the range on the line of play and let the golfer deal with it. It is a hard target to aim past. That is rather the point.

David McLay Kidd designed the course, which opened in 2010 as Huntsman Springs, and then did something architects rarely get to do. He came back and renovated his own design. The renovated course plays 7,613 yards from the back tees at par 72, and the renovation removed more than 35 bunkers from an original scheme that had roughly 150 of them. An architect subtracting his own bunkering is an architect admitting the first draft overdid it. The game could use more of that honesty.

Altitude, fen, and the math of 6,100 feet

Tributary sits at 6,100 feet of elevation in Teton Valley, woven through a 500 acre fen with 50 acres of wetlands. Every part of that sentence matters. At 6,100 feet the ball flies farther, which is the standard excuse for the 7,613 yard number, and fair enough, the yardage plays shorter than the card. But altitude also distorts judgment. Shots that should come up short sail, approaches that feel perfect fly the green, and the fen ground underneath it all is flat, wet and subtle where the mountains around it are anything but.

A fen is not a meadow and not a marsh. It is groundwater fed wetland, and building golf through 500 acres of it, with 50 acres of wetlands in the routing, means the course lives on its drainage and its restraint. Kidd's original leaned on bunkers for definition, roughly 150 of them, a visual argument on ground that did not need one. The renovation's removal of more than 35 bunkers reads like a course settling into its landscape. Fewer, better placed hazards on flat valley ground with water close by is a more confident design than sand everywhere.

Golf Digest has ranked Tributary in its Second 100 Greatest and in Best in State for Idaho. That is the ranking neighborhood of courses that panelists respect without quite canonizing, and it fits. Our Idaho state ranking lands in a similar place, high on the list, with the remaining argument about how the course matures.

The concession

The concession is the flatness, and visitors should hear it before they go. Teton Valley is a valley. For all the drama on the horizon, the ground under your feet is fen flat, and golfers raised on the idea that mountain golf means elevation changes on every hole will recalibrate for the first few holes. The 16th works precisely because the Teton does the lifting. If you need the terrain itself to heave and drop, courses across the pass will serve you better.

We would argue the flatness is the design's discipline rather than its failure. Kidd had a valley floor, wetlands, and the finest backdrop in American golf. Manufactured drama would have competed with the backdrop and lost. Instead the renovated course keeps its profile low, its bunkering reduced, its water close, and lets a 7,613 yard scorecard and one enormous mountain do the talking.

Access is private. Driggs is a small town in Teton County, and Tributary operates as a private course in that mountain valley setting, so the realistic routes in are membership or a member's invitation. The club does not publish costs, and any number attached to it should be read as an estimate in the high tier that private clubs under the Tetons tend to occupy.

The round ends the way the 16th promises. You play toward the mountains all day, in thinner air than your yardage book understands, on ground that hides its difficulty in water and width rather than slopes. Then the Teton fills the frame one more time, and the score feels like the least interesting thing you are taking home.

The bunker story bears one more look, because it cuts against the usual renovation script. Most renovations add: length, bunkers, difficulty, cost. Kidd's return to his own course subtracted, taking out more than 35 bunkers and trusting the fen, the wetlands and the altitude to defend the course instead. Architects almost never get to revise their published work. That this revision moved toward restraint, on private ground where no public constituency demanded it, says as much about the design's maturity as any ranking position.