Chamonix

Lying in the shadow of Mont Blanc, the original 9-hole layout at Golf Club de Chamonix was inaugurated in 1935. It then took almost half a century before Robert Trent Jones finally expanded the course to an 18-hole track in the early 1980s.

“In the Rhône-Alpes region, architects have also brought their imagination to courses in the mountains,” wrote Jean François Lefevre in France’s Most Beautiful Courses. “Skiers and snowboarders schussing down the mountains in winter have no idea that their acrobatics are describing the generous lips of a bunker covered with thick snow.

Building a course on slopes of such impressively varying heights may appear an impossible task. The first person to take up this challenge in France was the Englishman Henry Cotton, who created the Mont d’Arbois course in 1964 at an altitude of almost one thousand three hundred metres. Then it was the turn of Robert Trent Jones, who built the Chamonix Golf Club in the magnificent setting of Mont Blanc and the Aiguilles Rouges.

It was quite a task – and still is – given the very short period in which work can be carried out (June to October) and the short period in which the complex can make an income (at best, three months a year)… The course is quite flat and is used for cross-country skiing in the winter. In spite of these limitations mountain golf courses have proliferated.”