Doug Wood, a former director of golf at the Banff Springs Golf Course, recalls the day in the early 1990s when an elderly Bob Hope arrived from his California home to play the world-famous mountain layout.
"Heavy winds chased him into the clubhouse after six holes, but Hope was exhilarated by the experience," Wood says. "His old friend Bing Crosby had told him that Banff was one of the courses he had to play before he died."
Of Canada's nearly 2,100 public courses, only a few are considered so beautiful or architecturally unique that avid golfers would travel great distances to find out what all the fuss is about.
From the sand dunes of Prince Edward Island to the mountain valleys of Alberta and British Columbia, a roundup of acclaimed Canadian courses every golfer must play at least once - or regret it forever:
The Links at Crowbush Cove, Prince Edward Island
Few courses in the history of Canadian golf have equalled the sudden impact of PEI's the Links at Crowbush Cove.
Voted Golf Digest's best new Canadian course of 1994, the gorgeous Tom McBroom-designed North Shore layout ignited the local golf industry. More than a dozen new courses opened in Crowbush Cove's wake, while annual revenue from golf tourism in Canada's smallest province jumped to a high of around $80-million in 2005 from about $17-million in the mid-1990s.
Set beside the rolling dunes of a white-sand beach, Crowbush Cove features nine water holes, eight holes that skirt the lee side of the environmentally sensitive dunes, wide and undulating fairways, and green sites that are often severe, full of bumps and hollows and protected by deep-set bunkers.
But the most difficult obstacle to scoring well is the almost constantly howling wind. On a really blustery day, even low handicappers can struggle to break 90 at a seaside layout that has become synonymous with East Coast golf.
Highlands Links,
Nova Scotia
No less an authority than Canadian golf legend George Knudson raved about the almost unmatched natural splendour of Highlands Links, a Stanley Thompson-designed jewel set in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. "When you're driving up the road to the course, it's like driving up to heaven," Knudson said. "There's not a better walk in golf."
Nova Scotia's tallest mountains loom over wildly humped and slanting fairways that snake dramatically through terrain ranging from a pine-edged valley floor cut by the charging Clyburn River to rocky outcrops and seaside marshes. Thompson, the greatest of all Canadian golf architects, painstakingly sculpted views through the forest to reveal the ocean and the surrounding mountains. Especially memorable are green complexes left open at the front in the classic style, then made treacherous by the architect's distinctive hollows, run-offs and bumps.
Nearby, at the end of a long birch-lined drive, is Keltic Lodge, a provincially owned resort opened in 1940, a year before the launch of a course many still regard as Canada's best.
Glen Abbey Golf Club,
Ontario
World-famous as the host of 23 Canadian Open championships, Glen Abbey Golf Club offers amateurs the almost religious experience of playing in the spike prints of golf greats such as Tiger Woods, Greg Norman and Arnold Palmer.
After an absence of three years, Canada's premier tourney returns July 24-27 to the Jack Nicklaus-designed layout, located about 30 minutes west of Toronto in Oakville. With tight traps, fiendishly contoured greens and water hazards that come into play on 11 holes, the stadium-style course will challenge the world's top players in every sense.
Like a symphony conductor, Nicklaus builds momentum slowly, saving his best work for the valley holes, 11 through 15, before ending with a wallop on the par-five 18th. It was here that Woods sealed his victory in the 2000 Canadian Open with a 218-yard bunker shot to the green. So astonishing was the play that since then few golfers have been able to resist the temptation to drop a ball in the same bunker and try their luck.
Muskoka Bay Club, Ontario
Just as the Group of Seven altered our perception of the northern landscape, Doug Carrick, the architect of the Muskoka Bay Club, is in the vanguard of golf industry builders who are using the distinctive granite outcroppings of the Canadian Shield to create a new aesthetic.
Named Golf Digest's best new Canadian course of last year, Muskoka Bay is carved through rough-and-tumble terrain near the town of Gravenhurst, in the popular Muskoka Lakes tourist district. The site's ubiquitous pink granite outcroppings as well as wetlands and towering fir trees have all been used by Carrick to shape and accent holes in the same way that Arizona's courses are framed by cactuses and desert sand. Like restored artworks, particularly beautiful outcroppings have been power-washed to highlight their colourful striations.
Nowhere is this new design approach more vividly illustrated than at Muskoka Bay's ninth hole, surely one of the most memorable par fours in Canadian golf. Here, golfers must thread their approach shot through twin granite towers standing guard over the green like billion-year-old sentinels.
Dakota Dunes Golf Links, Saskatchewan
Previously unfamiliar to the majority of Canadian golfers, the stark and windswept charms of prairie golf finally grabbed the national spotlight when Golf Digest declared Dakota Dunes Golf Links Canada's best new course of 2005.
Designed by Canadians Wayne Carleton and Graham Cooke, this demanding 7,301-yard layout, located 26 kilometres south of Saskatoon, offers fairways that buck like a bronco across the natural sand dunes of the South Saskatchewan River Valley.
In keeping with the wishes of the course's principal owner, the Whitecap Dakota First Nation, the architects moved as little earth as possible during construction. Bunkers were left wild and woolly, edged by prairie grasses that snare wayward shots. Though generous landing areas challenge big hitters (two of the par fives are more than 600 yards long), slanting fairways, sinkholes and occasional blind shots from behind dunes booby-trap almost every hole of a course whose growing fame has knowledgeable golfers booking flights to Saskatoon.
Kananaskis Country Golf Course, Alberta
Long after starting out as Stanley Thompson's junior partner in the 1930s, illustrious American golf architect Robert Trent Jones Sr. left his own giant imprint on the Canadian game at Kananaskis Country Golf Course.
Funded by the oil-rich Alberta Heritage Fund, Jones's twin 18-hole layouts - named Mount Lorette and Mount Kidd after the nearby peaks that soar 3,000 metres above sea level - have been a major draw since opening an hour west of Calgary in 1983.
Both courses wend seamlessly through the Kananaskis River Valley, with more than 6.5 hectares of rivers, streams and ponds, and panoramic mountain views at every turn.
Most spectacular of all is Mount Lorette's 17th hole, a par three featuring a tee shot across the river to a green framed by a gorgeous mountain backdrop.
Jones himself called Kananaskis the best natural site he had ever worked with, high praise from an iconic figure famous for his oft-quoted philosophy that every golf hole should be a hard par but an easy bogey.
Banff Springs Golf Course, Alberta
Designed in the 1920s by Stanley Thompson, the Banff Springs Golf Course and the Fairmont hotel that looms like a fairy-tale fortress on the cliffs overhead have become totemic symbols of the Canadian game, recognized by golfers around the world.
Thompson's course was the first anywhere to cost more than $1-million. Its most celebrated hole, the par-three Devil's Cauldron, which he set beside an impossibly picturesque glacial lake, numbers among the most photographed in golf.
Wherever he could, the Toronto-born architect left nature alone, taking his routing through tunnels of fir trees, while bringing into play the Spray and Bow rivers. Thompson startled the golf world by clearing gaps through the forest to point golfers toward greens aligned with distant mountains and by whimsically patterning his bunkers after the snow formations on their peaks.
Following his triumph at Banff Springs, Thompson took his place among the world's top architects. His brilliantly conceived layout established a template for mountain courses followed to this day. In all the years since, nobody has done it better.
Greywolf Golf Course, British Columbia
Photographed for countless advertisements and golf magazine articles, Greywolf Golf Course's aptly named Cliffhanger is the most ballyhooed Canadian golf hole since Thompson unveiled the Devil's Cauldron eight decades ago.
Part of the Panorama Mountain Village ski and golf resort near the town of Invermere, Cliffhanger is the star attraction of a Doug Carrick design voted Golf Digest's best new Canadian course of 1999. Carrick's drama-filled layout features tree-lined fairways, mountain views on every hole and almost 500 feet of elevation change.
But it's the par-three
signature hole that leaves golfers gasping. Cliffhanger requires a long gut-churning carry over the sheer drop of Hopeful Canyon to a green perched along the edges of vertical rock cliffs. Rugged peaks tower in every direction, evergreens strain toward the sky, and from the green, golfers can see for kilometres down an incredibly beautiful mountain valley.
All that's missing from this picture-postcard Canadian setting is a Mountie standing on guard at the tee.
Pack your clubs
The Links at Crowbush Cove 1-800-235-8909; www.
golflinkspei.com. North Shore Tom McBroom layout ignited Prince Edward Island's golf boom. Green fees: $77.50 to $97.50.
Highlands Links 1-800-441-1118; http://www.highlandslinksgolf.com. Classic Stanley Thompson design in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. Green fees: $71.90 to $90.93.
Glen Abbey Golf Club 905-844-1800; http://www.clublink.ca.
Stadium-style Jack Nicklaus course will host this year's Canadian Open, July 24-27. Green fee: $235.
Muskoka Bay Club 1-866-361-7529; http://www.muskokabay.com. Doug Carrick layout shaped by the Canadian Shield. Green fee: $175.
Dakota Dunes Golf Links 1-877-414-4653; http://www.dakotadunes.ca. Wayne Carleton-Graham Cooke design carved through windswept prairie dunes. Green fees: $50 to $55.
Kananaskis Country Golf Course 1-877-591-2525; http://www.kananaskisgolf.com. Two mountain valley courses by legendary architect Robert Trent Jones Sr. Green fees: $90; $70 for Alberta residents.
Banff Springs Golf Course 403-762-6801; http://www.fairmont.com/golf. World-famous Stanley Thompson mountain design. Green fees: $149 to $219.
Greywolf Golf Course 1-888-473-9965; http://www.panoramaresort.com. Doug Carrick mountain layout features an iconic par three. Green fees: $89 to $149.