Alberta
The most populous of Canada’s three prairie provinces, Alberta is home to nearly four million people, many of whom reside in either Edmonton, the capital, or Calgary, the largest city. Five of the nation’s fourteen UNESCO World Heritage sites can be found in the province and these attractions draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to the great outdoors of Alberta every year.
The Alberta Golf Association was founded in 1912 with five clubs represented on the inaugural committee. The equivalent female governing body followed ten years later when the Alberta Branch of the Canadian Ladies Golf Union was established and it would eventually merge with the AGA in 2000, forming an organisation that now looks after 57,000 golfers in over 220 clubs.
Top tracks in the province include a pair of Robert Trent Jones Snr layouts – Mt. Lorrette and Mt. Kidd – at the spectacular Kananaskis Country Golf Course complex, two exciting Rod Whitman-designed courses at Wolf Creek and Blackhawk and a couple of wonderful old Stanley Thompson tracks that date back to the 1920s at Jasper Park Lodge and Banff Springs.
The two Kananskis courses that were
devastated by the flooding in 2013 were rebuilt by architect Gary
Browning at a reputed cost of $23 million, with the province
expecting to recoup three quarters of that sum from Ottawa’s
disaster recovery program. Thirty-two of the thirty-six holes that
were badly damaged by gravel, mud, silt and fallen trees had to be
totally reconstructed from scratch and both the Mt. Lorette and Mt.
Kidd layouts re-opened in the summer of 2018.
