One bold designer + endless massive boulders = 36 unforgettable holes at Rock Harbor Golf Course
By Marla Miranda Mooney
I came for the foliage and the fresh air, not fairways and flagsticks. Golf, at least the way I’d understood it, happened on TV, narrated in hushed tones by polite men in khakis.
But that was before my day at Rock Harbor.
On a morning so crisp that my breath arrived before I did, I found the parking lot quiet but not sleepy. There was energy in the air like that of the first day back at school after summer break. Nervous excitement, reunion, possibility.
That’s when I met Lee Kontz.
Lee’s been a starter/ranger at Rock Harbor for nearly a decade. As he showed me around, it was clear, the course lives in him—every twist of cart path, every slope and skyline. He spoke of it as though it were a lifelong friend. And in a way, it is. Because Rock Harbor isn’t just built. It’s shaped. Born from the ground it sits on. Sculpted from the stone and story beneath it.
I looked around, amazed. Course owner and designer Denny Perry used only what he had. What he had was a working limestone quarry, miles of rolling Shenandoah landscape, and a creative spark most designers would envy. The result? A golf course like no other. Two of them, actually—the “Rock” course and the “Boulder” course, each with their own distinct personality and challenges.
On the Boulder course, we stood at Hole 8, a par 3 that plays along the rim of the Perry Quarry. Denny’s bold design had parted the curtain on nature’s backstage, exposing the limestone walls in their rawest form. Like being behind the scenes at a hit Shenandoah Summer Music Theater show, I was seeing the pulleys and machinery that made the magic happen. And the view was … beautiful.
Hole 13 has a waterfall. A literal one. Not a trickling garden feature, but a real, cascading, can’t-hear-your-friends-talk-over-it waterfall, just right there behind the green like it was the most normal thing in the world.
And then we came to Hole 16—a tee box so elevated, so wide open, so sweeping, that my view of the Blue Ridge Mountains was endless. I’m told it’s a par 5, but for me it was a vantage point. A jaw-dropper. A reminder that even when you’re not swinging a club (or swinging it poorly), nature’s beauty never fails.
Every hole felt like a love letter to the land itself. Like someone looked at a pile of boulders, a quarry pit, a steep hill, and thought, “I can turn this into pure joy.” And that’s precisely what Denny has done.
By the turn, I wasn’t thinking about pars and birdies. Scores didn’t matter. I just knew I wanted to come back to Rock Harbor. I wanted to learn the game. Not to compete, but to understand the terrain better. I wanted to experience it again, differently. Maybe with a club in hand next time.