Oh Canda, you look fine for golf

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 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

DESTINATIONS

The 16th hole at spectacular Jasper Park Golf Club.

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

the course has made them great holes again," said Director of Golf Alan Carter. “They are vital, making the fifth a valid par5, and No. 10 a three-shot hole for all but the biggest hitters."

One student of Thompson, John D. Smith, vice president and chair of archives for the Stanley Thompson Society, says Thompson was in the forefront of strategic design and risk/reward options.

“At Banff and Jasper Park I can see his use of camouflage techniques to trick the eye and create confusion in the golfer’s mind," Smith said. “But he designed for the duffer as well as the low-handicap golfer. I think his designs are as enjoyable today as they were when he created them -- thus standing the test of time because they are fun and aesthetically pleasing."

Jasper Park’s most talked-about hole is named ‘Cleopatra,’ a downhill 231-yard par3 with Pyramid Peak framed in the panorama. The tale has been retold over and over that Thompson, waiting on money owed him, designed Cleopatra with a suggestive form of a beautiful woman to antagonize those who had hired him. He later went back and toned down Cleopatra’s curvy shape.

Your senses will come alive on this course, where there are no houses and few fairways where you can even see other golfers. And the four holes, 14-17, that skirt Lac Beauvert, a turquoise-blue glacial lake, will make you want to immediately play this 6,663-yard, par-71 course again.

Banff Springs Golf Course, a 7,083-yard, par-71, was built in 1928, three years after Jasper Park, as an amenity to the historic 770-room hotel that is known planet-wide. Thompson’s employers, the Canadian Pacific Railway, wanted the best course in the world and the million dollars spent made it the most expensive golf course of its day.

This awesome setting was made famous in the 1954 Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe western, River of No Return, with Marilyn actually teeing it up here and taking lessons. Elk can be spotted on the fairways, along with the occasional bear, and the Bow River thunders along into Bow Falls just before the confluence with the Spray River.

Hole after hole is memorable. The 440yard par-4 14th displays Thompson’s handsome bunkering with high-flashed faces, muscular mounds and shaggy edges. Then as you near the green the swift Bow River appears as does the massive Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel, punctuating the scene with its Scottish baronial castle design.

Many a golfer, however, looks upon the par-3 fourth, a 192-yarder named ‘Devil’s Cauldron,’ as his favorite. Mount Rundle dwarfs the scene, towering in the backdrop, over a green encircled by six bunkers. A glacial lake, mottled by a mosaic of rocks on its bottom, fronts the tricky putting surface that slopes from back to front.

The most fun hole, however, might be the back tee at the 15th, a 475-yard par-4. It’s a 180-yard carry over the Spray River to a wide fairway. When the course originally opened this was the first hole, just below the hotel. A new clubhouse caused the change in routing, but the original clubhouse remains as a casual eatery and watering hole, and this historic first tee is still sitting beside it.

Hospitality is imperative here at the Fairmont choices. The Banff Springs, Jasper Park Lodge and Le Ch‚teau Montebello are four-season luxury resorts with every summer outdoors activity imaginable. Fishing, hiking, biking, horseback riding, boating, canoeing, white-water rafting -- name a sport -- even hockey, ice skating, curling, snow-shoeing, dog sledding, cross-country skiing and tobogganing in winter. Close to Banff is another hotel not to miss, the Fairmont Ch‚teau Lake Louise, complete with one of the most astonishing glacial lake views in the world.

All of the hotels have spas and numerous dining choices. In Canada the top restaurants and chefs are found in the resort hotels.

Whether you study golf-course architecture or just want an outing to the great Canadian outdoors, there are countless reasons to make your next golf vacation to Canada, where traditional golf melds with unmatched mountain scenery.

Watch out for Elk on Banff Springs Golf Course.

David R. Holland is author of The Colorado Golf Bible and a former sportswriter for The Dallas Morning News.

Tell your wife that all you did for two weeks was PLAY GOLF. Onlythis time, it’ll be true.

Hole #2 at Ross Bridge

Alabama has more world-class public courses than any other state in America. So why would you want to go golfing anyplace else? Let’s start with The Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. It’s 24 courses spanning the state, including two brand-new ones at Ross Bridge near Birmingham, and The Shoals near Florence, where you will find the already-famous Fighting Joe course. Both Golf Magazine and Travel+Leisure Golf named it one of their Top 10 best new courses in America. And while The New York Times called The Trail “some of the best public golf on Earth,” we call it just the beginning. That’s because you’ll find another half-dozen challenging public courses on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. Like the stunning Kiva Dunes course or Craft Farms, featuring courses designed by Arnold Palmer and Larry Nelson.

And of course, sprinkled throughout the state are other well-known golf destinations like Limestone Springs, Goose Pond Colony, Bent Brook and Lakepoint State Park Resort. Truth is, you and your boys could play here for weeks and never play the same hole twice.