The driving range will be ready to go this weekend and the course will see limited play this summer, said owner and builder Buzz Kyllonen of Anchor Point.

For $4 to $6, golfers can hit balls on the only driving range south of Kenai, and check out what looks to be a challenging and fun golf course that will be open for business next summer.

On the course, the greens and tee boxes are already installed. But the course builders, including Anchor Point resident Tom Clark and Greg Lane, a golf superintendent from Tennessee, plan on giving the grass on the fairways some time to grow.

“We hope to contribute to make the southern peninsula a destination to our visitors, to help reinforce what we already have here, which is access to fishing,” he said.

Groundwork for the course, located on 50 acres off Milo Fritz Avenue, began more than two years ago, as the crew cleared trees, and created a man-made pond on the second hole.

Last summer, after visiting several courses in the Lower 48, they decided to install a new kind of synthetic green that will hold up to Alaska winters.

The first of their kind on the Kenai Peninsula, the greens look and play like their all-grass counterparts, but are made from nylon and filled with round quartz sand.

The synthetic greens cost more to install, said Clark. “But the maintenance costs are much lower,” he said.

Synthetic grass has come a long way from the days of rock-hard Astroturf, Kyllonen said.

And these new synthetic greens have caught the eyes of several PGA tour players, like Vijay Singh and John Daly, who practice on them at their homes when they’re not playing on the road.

The secret to their playability, Kyllonen said, is how they are built.

Out of the box, the greens are about an inch thick with individual nylon grass blades poking out of a hard rubber backing. After installing them like carpet over a hard gravel surface, the greens are then filled with 25,000 to 35,000 pounds of round quartz sand until only the tips of the fibers are showing.

The round sand doesn’t compact like other sand, leaving the surface smooth and receptive to shots up to 180 yards, Clark said.

Like on well-maintained traditional greens, balls stop quickly on these synthetic greens and don’t ricochet off like one would expect on hard Astroturf. Shots with enough backspin also can back up, like on traditional greens, he said.

In Alaska, where harsh winters, heavy rains and large wandering animals like moose can often ruin grass greens, Kyllonen is betting this new synthetic technology will become the wave of the future in the state.

Besides being rugged, the greens’ putting speed also can be altered simply by rolling or brushing them, Kyllonen said.

And after installing the nine greens in Anchor Point, Kyllonen has formed a business, called Alaska Turf Company, that can travel around the state installing putting greens for courses or individuals.

“There’s nothing like education,” he said. “Now we are geared up to go anywhere.”

The new course winds through a healthy spruce forest and fireweed meadows and will include two par-fours and seven par-threes of various lengths, including one over water.

The driving range is 240-yards long with four target greens and the hitting area is covered.

Contact Buzz Kyllonen at 235-7451 for more information.