While waiting to play through, duffers at Bountiful City Golf Course and North Salt Lake's Eaglewood Golf Course can entertain themselves by watching planes descend into Salt Lake International Airport.
At eye level.The courses, located just a few miles from each other on Bountiful Boulevard, offer spectacular views from their locations high on the east bench of the Wasatch Moun-tains.
But the views don't come cheap. Eaglewood is Davis County's most expensive golf course at $8 for nine holes on weekdays and $8.50 on the weekends. Eighteen holes cost twice that much. Bountiful currently charges a competitive $7.50 for nine holes, but the city is planning to bump that up 50 cents next winter.
Having opened only last year, Eaglewood is also the county's newest course. Though its grass and grounds have a few years ahead of them to fully mature, officials are working to position the course as the premiere place to play in the county.
"We're trying to project that it's a little bit nicer facility and worth the money to play it," said assistant golf pro Brad Hansen.
Bountiful's course was built in 1975. This spring, workers completed the first major improvements to the course since its inception - a system of picturesque streams, waterfalls and pools adjacent the eighth, ninth and 18th greens.
"It's been 20 years now, and we hadn't made any major changes to (the course)," said Bountiful parks and recreation director Neal Jenkins. "We're saying to folks, `We want to repay you for coming all these years by making this a quality experience.' "
The improvements to the 18th hole were designed to help give the course an identity.
"Eighteen is our signature hole, something that people will remember and want to come back and play the course to see," Jenkins said.
The course additions were the joint brainchild of Jenkins, golf pro Scott Whittaker, course superintendent Chuck Goode and City Manager Tom Hardy, avid golfers all. The City Council approved the $300,000 improvements last August, to be paid out of golf enterprise fund reserves.
"We're not increasing fees because of the water features," Jenkins said. "Fees have been short this year" because of bad weather.
Though the new features at the ninth and 18th holes are solely for show, the one at the eighth hole has a utilitarian function: keeping golfers who try to hit straight to the green, instead of staying on the curved fairway, from hooking their balls into the back yards of nearby homes.
"I haven't had near the golf balls going into the neighbors' yards since we did this," Jenkins said.
Construction of the water features, which used 800 tons of hauled-in rock, began last fall.
Though greens fees at any course strike some as pricey nowadays, a golf course is admittedly not an inexpensive operation. For example, the Bountiful course soaks up a whopping 1 million gallons of water per day during the hot days of summer.