Unless its posted otherwise and designated as a, "waste area" or, "through the green", it should be treated as a bunker. I agree that bunkers which arent raked suck and my best advice is to simply treat it like a bare lie.

If i make it back there i will take some pics, but i dont see that happening just because of how disappointed i was. From what my playing partner was telling me it use to be a private course, and was much nicer. Not sure if the economy took its toll on it or what but the couple traps i got into was what seemed to me to be pure brown michigan dirt

If I land in a bad trap I lift my ball, rake, and place.

Man, that sounds horrible. I would assume it'll deter you from returning but I do hope to see some pics haha!

hahaha I google imaged 'worst bunker ever' and a pic shows up from THP!!! Bogey_Russ had this trainwreck of a lie..

http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/1...0804153712.jpg

Wow is that gravel haha

I've been told that they are expensive to maintain. The ones at our course are decent, but they drain like a clogged toilet and then look/play awful until they are dry enough to fix again.

I don't know too many courses that have excellent bunker drainage. My course is spending a bunch of money changing the sand and putting in new drainage and they still sit with puddles after rain. I want to play a course that manages it well to know the difference between excellent drainage and what I consider to be standard.

play them as wasted area, not as a sand trap. Even though it was meant to be as a sand trap, then it is course's job to maintain it. If they don't, then you can't play them as what it was designed for.

Also, talk to your playing partners, and get their opinions to see what they want to do.

I'll say this first - people can do whatever you want and I don't care one way or the other.

That being said, my personal belief is that because a bunker is a hazard, I don't think that getting something perfect to hit the ball out of should always be the expectation. Obviously, the perfect courses we see on TV give us high expectations, but I think they are all called hazards for a reason.

Our rough is littered with sparse hardpan thanks to the drought, but I'm not moving the ball to green grass because it's hard to hit off of. Obviously, issues that could damage your clubs are a little different, but in the broad sense, golf isn't always fair.

My course has some of the same issues with some of the bunkers. Many of the members will pull the ball out of the trap. I prefer to play it how it lies with a couple of exceptions: 1) if there are rocks right around the ball, I will pick them out.
2) if the ball is in a wet spot, I will take relief from casual water.
3) if the area of the trap I am in is peeling from being wet then baked by the sun, I will move the ball to the nearest sandy area no closer to the hole.

I miss decent sand traps; from a well maintained trap a sand shot is the easiest shot in the game. I used to work in course maintenance years ago, so I know what is required to make them maintainable (new gravel bed underneath, weed-stopping netting, decent sand on top), but the course lacks the funds to do the work. The unusually harsh winter weather doesn't help either. Luckily they have made some of the worst offenders GUR and are fixing the traps up slowly. Once the work is complete the course should be a lot more fun to play.

Cheap course sand traps
 

This year im trying to break away from the courses i normally play and try some of the cheaper less known courses in the area. Yesterday i played at a rather cheap course and came across an issue that i didnt know how to handle. I landed a ball in a green side "sand trap". However when i walked up to it, i discovered that it had no sand in it and i can only assume that it was constructed by digging a hole and raking it, it also had a couple very small weeds growing in it. Now i played it as a sand trap, but am wondering if i could of played it as a waste area? Any help is appreciatedhttp://www.thehackersparadise.com/fo...es/golfing.gif

Unless there is a local rule, I'd assume that it's a hazard. Never very fun to run across.

A lot of courses don't want to spend the money needed to do more than fill it with sand and drive the rake-cart thing around it once every few days. Courses who aren't after a reputation as a top-notch course don't need perfect bunkers.

At my home course all traps are played as waste bunkers. Is there a lot of maintenance involved with keeping them up? I've heard people say that the cold winters up here make it hard to have good ones, but I don't understand why they couldn't get them nice with a bit of work in the spring.

Anybody have any course maintenance experience that can tell us why good sand bunkers are rare on cheaper courses?

this is exactly what i was having trouble with. after two failed attempts to get out of it i had to pull out the trusty hand wedge

The course my league plays in has terrible traps. They're usually hard packed, unless your ball happens to land in the bank, in which case it will just bury and not roll back down.

My home course has a few traps like that. I play them as bunkers. It's just harder to pull off a good shot.

The ones I'm talking about are a big mix of very hard packed down sand and dirt. Sort of like when those guys in the PGA today had a shot off the walking path, if you saw any of those shots. I can play a full shot off them fine because they play almost like regular dirt, but a bit softer.

I don't like cheap sand traps. The sand is so packed down and hard that it takes a miracle shot for me to actually get under it properly and get it out and stop it.