Banff Springs Golf Course - Canada

The Banff Springs Hotel and Golf Course was developed by the Canadian Pacific Railway as a resplendent playground in the Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies, 80 miles west of Calgary, Alberta. The golf course, which opened in 1928, was designed by Stanley Thompson, the legendary Canadian architect of the golden era of golf course architecture. The course is laid out in the Bow Valley along the confluence of the Bow and Spray Rivers. The arching fairways trace the serpentine of the Bow, with the granite faces of Mount Rundle, Sulphur Mountain, and Tunnel Mountain flanking the course. Blasted from the bedrock and carved from an immense fortress of evergreens, Banff Springs is reputed to have been the first course to cost over $1 million to build. The most famous hole is the "Devil's Cauldron," a 170-yard par-three from an elevated tee across a glacial pond to a green at the base of Mount Rundle. The 800-room Banff Springs Hotel, which officially opened on June 1,1888, rises like a vast baronial palace above the course.

Jasper Park Lodge Golf Course - Canada

Jasper Park Lodge Golf Course is another tour de force in the Canadian Rockies of Alberta designed by the incomparable Stanley Thompson. Opened in July 1925, the course is set in Jasper National Park, just outside the town of Jasper, on the diaphanous green waters of Lac Beauvert. Above the fairways tower the purple-blue snow-capped peaks called the Whistlers (not to be confused with Whistler Mountain in British Columbia). Thompson supposedly patterned the bunkers after the snow formations on the mountains. The course is routed in a clockwise loop, with the 14th through 16th holes running along a flinthead of land that juts into Lac Beauvert, where the loons can be heard in the early morning. The ninth is a 230-yard par three, known as "Cleopatra," that plays downhill from a steeply elevated tee. Thompson originally shaped the fairway to resemble the figure of a voluptuous woman when viewed from the tee. The management of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which developed the course, had Thompson revise the fairway contours, but the name stuck.