The great green North By DAVID R. HOLLAND One discovers just how spectacular the scenery is in the Canadian Rockies when you hear someone from Colorado brag about it. The Icefields Parkway, Alberta’s northsouth byway from Jasper to Banff national parks via Lake Louise, is a neck-straining journey of unimaginable beauty. It forces you to look upward at the granite-gray craggy mountain tops as you breeze along beside the Saskatchewan River, past the Columbia Icefields and Peyto Lake and near Bow and Crowfoot Glaciers and Athabasca Falls. It’s one of the world's most spectacular mountain highways, and the peaks seem thousands of feet taller than the many 14,000-foot peaks you see on a similar drive in Colorado. But actually these Canadian mountains are not higher, they just seem that way because they rise from a much lower elevation. If traffic grinds to a halt, like in Yellowstone National Park, you know tourists are gawking at and photographing a grizzly, black bear, moose, caribou or bighorn sheep. But I’m not here for the wildlife. I’ve come for the golf courses of The Fairmont Banff Springs and The Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, both designed by Stanley Thompson, a legendary Canadian designer who tutored Robert Trent Jones Sr. and teamed with Jones and Donald Ross as founding fathers of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. Like some overachievers in life, Thompson was far from perfect. He died in 1953, not even out of his 50s, broke and alcoholic. Canada’s premier ritzy hotel chain, Fairmont, actually has a promotion called The Stanley Thompson Trail, which also includes Le Chateau Montebello, the world’s largest cedar-log structure. It is located between Montreal and Ottawa in the province of Quebec. Here you can enjoy the French Canadian culture and tee it up on Thompson’s Le Chateau Montebello Golf Club, designed in 1929. This 6,308-yard, par70 layout features narrow fairways carved into granite shelves and fun elevation changes. Views include the Laurentian Mountains and the historic Ottawa River. But my favorite is 2,000 miles west in the Rocky Mountains of Canada -- Jasper Park Golf Club, which could be the most pleasing walk in a park you have ever experienced. The peaks and forests of Jasper National Park encircle you here and the hotel is more
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D E S T I N AT I O N S
The 16th hole at spectacular Jasper Park Golf Club. like a dude ranch with luxury. Even Alister Mackenzie, designer of Augusta National and Cypress Point, said Jasper Park was the finest course he ever played. Thompson had a fondness for placing traps in the path of average golfers and he’d probably be upset that today's low-handicappers with superior equipment just boom it over these obstacles that angle out into the fairways. One such fairway bunker is on No. 5, the 480-yard par-5 and another cross bunker on No. 10, rebuilt during a 1994 restoration that used Thompson's original blueprints. “Putting those original bunkers back on
WHERE TO PLAY Fairmont Banff Springs Golf Course banffsprings.com, (403) 762-6801, (800) 441-1414
Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge Golf Club Fairmont.com, (780) 852-6090, (800) 441-1414
Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise Fairmont.com, (800) 441-1414
Fairmont Le Chateau Montebello Golf Course Fairmont.com, (819) 423-6341
SOUTH CENTRAL GOLF
