Up there: Thinking outside the tee box

In 1948, the Yellowknife Golf Club was founded by miners and bush pilots with more entrepreneurial enthusiasm than cash. It is fair to assume at least some of them had golf clubs, though.

The exact date is hard to pinpoint, but around the time of the club’s opening, a Douglas Aircraft Company DC-3 crashed nearby. So naturally, the first clubhouse was the pilfered fuselage of the plane.

This origin story is amusing, but also instructive.

Today, the golf course in the capital of the Northwest Territories is regarded as one of the most unique anywhere. Its history is grit, its tales fill books, and its play is unconventional.

Thin soils, plenty of exposed Canadian Shield bedrock, short summers, and little ability to irrigate mean that, to this very day, the fairways are sand. The bunkers are also sand, in case you were wondering—just difficult to differentiate.

The tee boxes are artificial turf. The greens are known as “browns”—previously they were oiled sand designed to create a smooth putting surface. Like Torrey Pines.

Along with your golf clubs, you carry a square of turf. Wherever your ball lands on that sandy fairway, you place your turf down. You pick up your ball, set it on the turf, and use any club other than your sand wedge because, ironic as it sounds, you do not need it on this course.

For its first 45 years of operation, the club had a nine-hole layout. The fuselage clubhouse was replaced with a permanent building in the late 1960s, and in the 1990s experimental artificial greens were installed. By 1995, all nine greens were artificial. In 1999, the course expanded to an 18-hole, 6,391-yard layout. Those sandy fairways were kept for geological and climatic reasons, but also because the club’s identity had become defined by them.

You may be surprised to hear there are golf courses even farther north than Yellowknife.

In Kugluktuk, Nunavut, along the pristine shores of the Coronation Gulf on a giant sandbar at the mouth of the Coppermine River, you will find the Kugluktuk Golf Club. The play is similar to that in Yellowknife, but I have a hunch the views might be better. Keep in mind that in the spring and fall, tens of thousands of caribou migrate through the area, and they are not known for their golf course etiquette.

If you were planning a golf trip with some clients, you might also consider adding the Ulukhaktok Golf Club in the Northwest Territories to the itinerary. Only 345-kilometres from Kugluktuk, north across the Amundsen Gulf, this nine-hole course is the northernmost club in the world. The pace is slow, given it, too, has all the Arctic golf characteristics, but always let the muskoxen play through.

Back to Yellowknife.

When I play golf at home and land one in the bunker, I often say a swear word, as though it is a bad thing. But to golf in the continuous fairway sands of the Yellowknife Golf Club is a treat.

Why am I going on about golf courses when I should be talking about construction?

Partly because I am very excited for golf season. Santa got me some new clubs for Christmas.

But also—and more importantly—because in the North, you, your ideas, what you build, and how you build it must be malleable.

There is a broader Canadian tendency to treat the North as a problem to be solved by importing southern solutions. Yet some of the North’s most durable successes have come from doing the opposite. The Yellowknife Golf Club has survived for decades not because it copied Augusta National, but because it never tried to.

The North does not reward imitation.

Who needs fancy golf course agronomy when you have northern ingenuity? And who needs a sand wedge when you do not have to take a penalty for picking up your ball and placing it perfectly on your bit of turf for a money-swing with your nine iron?

Keep that fuselage clubhouse in mind. It was infrastructure.

Fore!