If Stephen King wrote a horror novel about a golf course, Lava Links might serve as his inspiration.
That’s because the 606-yard, par-3 located on near-unplayable volcanic terrain in Soap Lake, Washington, should come with a warning to play at anyone’s peril. Balls, which zing around like pinballs, are kissed goodbye in the same vein as a pro loses his on TPC Sawgrass’ 17th hole. Players make countless deposits into the yawning mouth of terrorizing Lost Ball Basin, synonymous with Lava Links’ fourth hole, at a frequent clip.
It’s almost guaranteed clubs will come away with more scrapes than an unbalanced toddler learning to walk. That’s why it’s recommended to bring only a 9-iron and putter.
Intimidated yet? It gets better. Imagine taking basalt rock, thorny sagebrush, little, if any, grass, and sand, and throwing it together in a magical pitch-and-putt design blender. That’s Lava Links, where there’s no water usage and an unforgiving 320 days of sun year-round. It sits in a desert environment where the region receives 9 inches of water annually. The best times to golf: April until August, when it gets unbearably hot.
So the question begs: Why would anyone want to play this free course teeming with natural land mines not so conducive to golf? It might sound oxymoronic, but it comes down to the enjoyable experience.
“I don’t know how you can put it, but it’s fun,” says 72-year-old Nels Borg, a Soap Lake resident with wry humor who volunteered to be the superintendent and golf pro. “It’s like a Pachinko game. I would tell people who want to play it that we’re playing Pachinko today. If you hit a rock, it’s going to go flying — and you’re going to love it.”
Therein lies the intended joke. It wasn’t developed as the next Pine Valley Golf Club, the top-ranked U.S. course each year. If anything, it’s the polar opposite, called everything from the place where balls go to disappear to golf hell on Earth. The closest thing to manicured greens would be found in the nearest nail salon.
“It’s kind of like playing golf on the moon, if you can imagine that,” town historian Burr Beckwith told King5 TV in 2022.
If beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, then this was the furthest thing from a gem sparkling like moissanite.
Lava Links’ history dates to the early 2000s when then-mayor DeVaun Black viewed the four-acre tract of land, surrounded by small homes abutting Soap Lake, as an eyesore. At the time, the land was being used to dump trash among other things. Black thought the land could be used for recreational purposes.
Black one day hopped on a tractor pulling a railroad tie and loosely shaped the outlines of a course. He told The Columbia Basin Herald in 2022 that the area was so overgrown that the sagebrush was over the heads of others mowing it down. The land belongs to real estate developer Sam Israel, who decided to lease it to the city for $1 a year. Black and another one of Borg’s friends devised the layout.
Says Borg: “The two guys that set it up, they have a real good sense of humor, and they looked at this acreage and just said, ‘Let’s build a golf course. We’re not going to have greens because they will die, but you’ve just got to keep the desert away from the fairways.’
“They put the course together and now these two gentlemen are aging out. They just can’t manage it anymore. And I just happened to have a riding lawnmower and agreed to handle the upkeep.”
Along with the roughly 20 hours he devotes to the course each year, Borg spends about $100 of his own money toward maintenance. There used to be a donation box near the first tee, but Borg said it got vandalized, so they did away with it.
Anyone of any level can play. Players walk on since there is no staff or fees. Just bring lots of balls. The shortest hole measures 45 yards; the longest measures about 100 yards. Fixating a tee in the ground can be something of a hassle since some of the ground is impenetrable.
Besides the tricky carries and walks through sagebrush and desert vegetation, players are presented with large — and, in some cases, crumbling — basalt rocks. That’s where the pinball entertainment comes in. Inaccurate shots lead to an unforgiving result. Or maybe not always.
“If you go past the green, you’re going to hit rock,” Borg says. “I’ve gotten two hole-in-ones by accident.”
The greens wouldn’t be confused with lightning-fast U.S. Open complexes by any means. Lava Links greens are made of dense sand. Feral cats also sometimes confuse them with litter boxes, Borg says.
Borg adds most of the work occurs in spring when he mows the vegetation twice and gets the place in proper order. Some of the most time-consuming work happens on the greens. Similar to dragging the dirt and sand on a little league baseball field, Borg grooms each green with carpet samples on two-by-fours with an attached rope.
“You go around in a circle to flatten out the sand around the six-inch PVC cups,” Borg says.
The local community, population 1,600, takes pride in the course. Washington state recently observed the area as a creative district with top-notch artists. An impoverished area, Soap Lake has been a longtime hippie colony with an interesting background. Named Soap Lake because of naturally occurring foam in the mineral-rich waters, the town was incorporated in 1919.
A drought during the Great Depression led to the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. Irrigation canals repurposed Soap Lake after tourists flocked to the area upon hearing that the minerals in the water presented healing elements. War veterans and others with Buerger’s disease have been treated at Soap Lake. Soap Lake’s motto eventually became “Your cure for the ordinary.”
In the 1950s the lake became increasingly diluted, related to seepage from the irrigation canals. Since then, the city has tracked the lake’s health while still branding itself as a tourism area. The hope is that the tourism money flows in, which in turn, helps support artistic endeavors. Even if Lava Links one day earns the worst golf course in the U.S. moniker, that’s just another tourism plug for Soap Lake. In this case, a negative equals a positive.
“You can’t take it seriously,” says Borg of the course. “That’s the whole thing about all of it. I’ve never seen anybody who has played it upset with the course.”
On May 17, Lava Links will host its annual Sandblaster Open and it entails a best-ball shotgun start over nine holes, and featuring 36 players — with loose rules. Players are encouraged to be creative with outfits. Prizes are awarded.
“It’s a comedy,” Borg says. “‘Oh, that one didn’t look good. Do it again.’ And, ‘OK, that shot never happened. Do it again.’ Or we have what we call the time machine, where we say, ‘Let’s get in a time machine and play that one over again.'”
As the U.S. Golf Association and R&A have studied myriad ways to make golf more fun, Lava Links exemplifies that outlandish hazards and a couple of clubs can still mete out joy.
“I just love that it’s not taken seriously,” Borg says. “We just want it to be fun, you know?”
So, in the end, that potential King story about a horrific golf course would have an added twist: a happy conclusion.