The Walker Lake Golf Course closed suddenly last month, taking away one of the only recreational outdoor activities that people could enjoy in Hawthorne and Mineral County. The 9-hole course opened in 1954, and its closure has left a great hole in the small town.

“It was a nice golf course, it had a lot of people at the time (around 220 members) for a little 9-hole course,” says former Walker Lake Golf Course Professional Pete Summerbell, who has worked on and off at the course over the past several decades.

Courtesy of Golf Hawthorne Facebook Page – The grass around a green at Walker Lake Golf Course is already drying out after the course closed last month.

He explains that the U.S. Navy originally built the course in 1954 on the military base, first lining the area with trees to protect the homes around it and create a natural windbreak before a golf course just showed up on it.

“A combination of the Navy and volunteers from the community helped get it established,” he says. Summerbell remembers the course’s management changed hands in 1979 when the Army took over the base. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers functioned as the stewards of the course and held the lease but was looking for someone else to manage it. They turned the course over to the private contractor Day & Zimmermann (which later became known as SOC) when the private contractor could show that managing the course would be no cost to the government.

The course changed hands again in 1984, but it became a conflict of interest for the new entity that took it over from Day & Zimmerman. Therefore, community members got together and took over the Walker Lake Golf Association. The group managed it for a couple of years before putting it back out to bid.

The next private entrepreneur who took over the contract from the Association had it for six years, but by that time the water usage fees were included in the contract. For reasons that are unclear, the owner couldn’t make it work and it ended up back in the hands of Day & Zimmerman.

Now it’s the year 2000 and Day & Zimmerman/SOC have the course again, but it didn’t have as many members as it did before. There were still well over 100 members, though- most of them Hawthorne residents- and the course continued to stay alive.

“It always operated on a loss, but we kept it going because we felt it was a benefit to employees and the community,” Summerbell says.

The U.S. Army Contracting Command agreement came up for renewal in 2019, and this time the golf course was included in the contract. SOC lost the bid, and DynCorp International LLC (a subsidiary of Amentum) took it over, going into effect on January 19, 2022. The new contractor went through a 2-month or so transition process in April/May before the parent company Amentum took it back from DynCorp.

Amentum never shared their intentions with the golf course with anyone, and the community was kept in the dark to its plans. They had no obligation to run it, and residents suggests that the contractor didn’t know what was involved. The SOC only sold memberships through June 30 when its contract with the Army Corps of Engineers ended, and then a few weeks later, Amentum closed the course.

“I spent a lot of years out here; we did a lot of improvements and hosted a lot of fundraisers. It was a real social point for the whole community that also raised a ton of money.

“They kept watering it for a while but there was no real maintenance to the course, no mowing or anything. And they never gave anyone a chance to take it over.

“It’s seventy years of history that just went poof,” Summerbell says.