The Lake Joseph Club

Unlike his 1994 Best New Canadian Course winner, the Links at Crowbush Cove, which was bulit on a sandy oceanfront site on Prince Edward Island, the granite-rock site of Lake Joseph dictated that Thomas McBroom followed the flow of the land.

He has uphill drives to tabletop fairways and downhill ones over fields of outcroppings. He fashioned smallish greens with only a few basic cants and slants of contour. Even his bunkering is subdued, positioned mostly to define doglegs rather than punish pushes or pulls. It’s hard to recall an artificial mound on the course.

Except for three holes in open meadow, Lake Joseph is a rugged, mountainous course. The par-4 10th sits in the shadow of a high granite cliff; the 149-yard eighth plays off a cliff to a putting surface at the base of another wall of rock. The par-4, 474-yard ninth plays seemingly off the end of the earth. The fairway of the 18th hole, with a granite wall along the left, seems to stop beyond the landing area. Once out there, you look down a virtual ski slope to a long, narrow green far below, edged by a pond to the right and a hillside of white pine to the left.

A round of golf at Lake Joseph is as invigorating as the brisk-morning Canadian air. It is a private club intended for use of members and guests of an adjacent resort hotel. Walking is permitted at all times, but most walkers opt for the excellent nine-hole, par-3 course adjacent to the main layout. --Ron Whitten, architecture emeritus