Splendor in the mountains - Greywolf Golf Course, Panorama, British Columbia - Brief Article

Golf Digest, Dec, 1999

What Canada lacks in an extended golf season, it makes up in knockout scenery. That's particularly true of Golf Digest's Best New Canadian Course of 1999, Greywolf Golf Course in the aptly named resort community of Panorama, British Columbia.

Golf at Greywolf is a May-to-October proposition, weather permitting, but what a glorious six months. The setting is serene, a mountain range far away from urbanization. It's inspirational, with every fairway lined by ponderosa pines reaching high into the sky. It's exhilarating, forcing play over a rushing mountain stream on the par-5 fifth, then across a deep gorge on the par-3 sixth. It's humbling, the entire course tucked into a few seams beneath massive slopes of the Canadian Rockies.

The artful design is the work of Ontario golf architect Doug Carrick, whose Clark Kent manner belies a bold imagination. Greywolf marks the second Best New victory for designer Carrick, who'd won with Ontario's Angus Glen Golf Club in 1995.

Greywolf prevailed against the strongest field of contenders in the nine-year history of the Canadian category. Runner-up SilverTip Golf Course in Canmore, Alberta, is another mountain beauty.

Designed by veteran Canadian architect Les Furber, SilverTip features "extreme golf," in the form of more than 500 feet of elevation change and the highest back-tee Slope Rating in Canada (153). Furber also designed third-place The Links of GlenEagles in Cochrane, Alberta, a public residential-development 18 atop a vast plateau overlooking the Bow River.

R.W.