Kamloops is a year-round recreational paradise with superb snowboarding and skiing, water-skiing and white water rafting, hiking and biking trails, hunting and fishing, and not surprisingly given its amazingly varied topography...  golf.

Kamloops Golf Club, the area's first golf course was designed more than 50 years ago by the club’s first head pro, Rod Palmer and the course pased every test of time. For the next 22 years, it was really the only game in town. But so much has changed since then. The ball really got rolling in 1980 when the legendary Robert Trent Jones accepted an invitation to create what many consider his best ‘links-style’ course on the banks of the South Thompson at Rivershore Golf Course.

It is always an experience to play a Robert Trent Jones course, and Rivershore is no exception. One of the game’s most respected architects, the father of golf architects Rees and Robert Trent Jr., Jones designed just three courses in Canada, the two at Kananaskis in Alberta being the others. At Rivershore, in the tradition of the ancient game and Jones designs, players can clearly see every hazard from the tees and fairways. The greens are small, and well guarded. A superb test of golf, Rivershore is perennially ranked among the province’s best courses.

Then, high above the river’s edge, Robert Heaslip carved a spectacular Eagle Point Golf Course among the pines in 1991. At 6,762 yards from the blues, Eagle Point carries a slope of 137. But visitors come away thinking more about the tranquility and isolation of each hole, the stands of Ponderosa pines, and the terrific looks from the tee boxes of the Thompson River valley below.

Then came Canadian Graham Cooke and his associate Wayne Carleton’s first nine in the area at the foot of Tod Mountain at the Sun Peaks Golf Course —among the finest ski resorts in North America — which opened in 1995. Cooke-Carleton’s The Dunes golf course — named the2005 Course of the Year by the BCPGA—opened in 1997.

Nine holes at Sun Rivers Golf Course opened in 2001, with the back nine of another great Cooke-Carleton design on the bench lands at the base of Mounts Peter and Paul opening in 2002.The back nine of the Cooke-Carleton designed SunPeaks at the base of Tod Mountain opened last year. Sun Rivers plays to over 7,000 quite spectacular yards. One of the precious few desert courses in Canada, the course shares its slopes with mountain sheep, and its rolling fairways with golfers and photographers. The views rival the shots values throughout the course.


The Dunes, named the 2005 B.C. course of the year, is a sand-based site, and we moved the sand to create the dunes on a relatively flat, desert-like piece of land,” Wayne Carleton explained. 
 

The Kamloops canvas has expanded and has been refined since the first golf course was built and the latest additions blend in beautifully.

But it’s far from over yet. At the site of the storied Six Mile Ranch, Canadian Tom McBroom’s Tobiano (pronounced tow-be-yah-no, the name of the famous ‘painted’ horses of the American southwest) is slated to open next June. And The Talking Rock, by Cooke and Carleton, at the Quaaout Resort on the shores of Little Shuswap Lake, is scheduled to open in 2007.

“Well, you have Cooke and Carleton, Jones and McBroom, so the Kamloops area has great designers, and we have a tremendous quality and variety in the courses,” said Ian Henson, director of golf at Sun Rivers. “You have desert golf [Sun Rivers, The Dunes]; links-style [Rivershore];tree-lined, rolling hills [Eagle Point, Sun Peaks]; and traditional style [Kamloops]. The weather is fantastic, and the value is outstanding.”


The Kamloops area certainly has become a nice golf package that will soon be topped off with Talking Rock and Tobiano. Already blessed with some of the best in the world, B.C. now has another golf destination.