What are the chances of a B.C. golf course winning Canada's Best New Course award three years in a row?
When the Ridge Course at Predator Ridge Resort officially opens on July 1st, it should receive serious consideration for that top honour. Designer Doug Carrick has done a masterful job, creating a golf experience unsurpassed in the Okanagan Valley – and perhaps all of B.C.
Last year Sagebrush Golf & Sporting Club, in Merritt, was the best course in the country, according to ScoreGolf magazine. Tobiano, near Kamloops, earned the coveted distinction the previous season. Carrick's other B.C. design – Greywolf, in Panorama – won the award in 2003.
The rolling landscape of the Ridge Course goes over open grasslands and into a wooded valley, where elevation changes and rock outcroppings assert themselves. As a golfer on this course, you're on a journey that will challenge your nerve and test your skill.
When every hole is good, it's hard to pick your favourite. Mine is the sixth (pictured): the view of Okanagan Lake while standing on the tee is breathtaking, as is the sight of the fairway below that starts from the edge of the cliff. Your tee shot must thread a narrow, rock-walled canyon that drops down into a generous fairway and landing area that waits below like a big catcher's mitt.
Carrick's well-conceived design often helps the golfer through their round with areas of containment that force the ball to bounce back in to play and occasionally back on to the green. With some of the best growing conditions in the country and a determined superintendent, this soon-to-open course looks and feels like it has been in play for years.
Other new courses will open across Canada this year, sure, but can any claim as dramatic a setting as Carrick's Ridge Course? No. If you take your clubs to B.C.'s Okanagan in 2010, you simply have to play it.
Image: Predator Ridge Golf Resort
