Gamble Sands is preparing to open a new Scarecrow course in August 2025

Gamble Sands in Brewster, Washington will open its new David McLay Kidd-designed Scarecrow Golf Course in August 2025.

The new 6,900-yard facility joins the resort’s 7,200-yard Sands course, which opened for play in 2014, and the 14-hole QuickSands short course, which opened in 2021, both designed by Kidd.

Scarecrow is located near apple and cherry orchards, which are also owned by Gamble Sands’ owners, the Gebbers family.

Kidd and design collaborator Nick Schaan laid out the course with views of the Columbia River Valley over rolling terrain and ridges. “This part of the site has higher, pointier spots that are more like classic sand dune and sandhill outcroppings, and we have exposed some of them, some of them we have preserved,” Schaan said. “The property – for the new course – is just smaller. If you draw a circle around the first course, it will be 350-500 acres depending on how you draw it.

“This new course is about 300 acres, so it’s a lot more compact, things are a little closer together. But the fairways are still wide – in some cases even wider than the original Sands course. The entire golf course climbs over this hill, through a saddle, up another hill, through a valley – you see a lot more of the river, hole after hole after hole. And you see a lot more golf on the property that you don’t play.”

The greens at Scarecrow are smaller than those at the Sands. “As we entered the site, walked around and looked at the narrowness and steepness of the contours compared to the first course greens, the greens had to be smaller to fit into the spaces that made good green spaces,” Schaan said. “There’s still a ton of grass around the areas that are supposed to be covered, because all the steeper contours that you can’t call ‘green’ can still be used to roll a ball around. It’s different but the playability is the same as the Sands course.”

Bunkering on Scarecrow is different from the large sand areas on the Sands course. “Gamble Sands has this big, sprawling sand character – it’s so massive that if we recreated it the same way again, the golf courses would look similar,” Schaan said. “But this is awkward in the steeper terrain, so the sand areas are broken up into chunks and smaller pieces and group compositions rather than these massive sand areas.”