Featured Golf Trip: Banff

High time to start thinking about some ​summer golf​, so let’s head north to Canada, and to the crisp mountain air of Banff.

You may or may not already know about the scenery of the area, a slice of Alberta that sits about four hours above the northwest tip of Montana. Its jagged mountains rise above a sea of evergreens. Its glacial lakes emit an almost fluorescent turquoise.

Well its golf courses, too, are something special, packaging together the surroundings for your viewing pleasure between swings.

Banff Springs comes with the most acclaim of the bunch. It’s a Stanley Thompson design that sits at No. 60 on Golf Digest‘s ​best golf courses in the world​, with “near-vertical cliffs of Mount Rundle towering 3,000 feet over almost every fairway.” The course meanders alongside the pristine Bow River.

If you decide you can’t get enough Stanley Thompson, head further north. Up in Jasper Park—a four-hour drive through the Canadian Rockies that, by all ​accounts​, sounds like a pretty remarkable experience in and of itself—sits another Thompson gem tied to a Fairmont. ​Jasper Park Lodge​ actually ranks higher on Golf Digest‘s best in the world, at No. 45.

Of course, if you’d rather contain your adventures, you’ll find plenty of great golf back in Banff. ​Silvertip​, ​Stewart Creek​, ​Kananaskis​, and ​Canmore​ are among the other publicly accessible stunners.

This is a golf trip that does not come particularly cheap—but it’s not impossible to limit the damage by staying off property and choosing your golf courses a la carte.