Everything's extreme at Alberta's SilverTip

By Leigh Hallenberg,
Staff Writer

CANMORE, Alberta (June 6, 2003) -- SilverTip Golf Course calls itself the course "where nature plays through."

Canmore resident Les Furber, who designed SilverTip and 100 more courses worldwide, calls it an "extreme golf experience."

It may sound like just another attempt to appeal to everyone's sense of adventure, but SilverTip just may be as extreme as golf can get. Nearly everything about SilverTip is extreme. From its conception to its design to the extremely positive ratings it received after opening in 1998: It's doubtful there's another course like SilverTip anywhere else in the world.

Furber says that when he was first brought on to the project, the main concern was finding a way to create a golf course, and subsequent housing for a resort, on a very rocky piece of Rocky Mountain acreage. SilverTip sits on a bench overlooking the floor of the Rocky Mountain Valley. This made things more difficult than building a traditional valley course.

"We had to look at laying out the golf course so that it fit in the landscape and we did not have to transform the landscape to fit our design ideas," Furber said.

Furber said a difficult process was finding a way to soften the features of the mountain property so turf grass could grow. He also wanted to minimize the course's molding so as to allow the mountain's natural beauty to be the key element of the course. Because SilverTip sits on a bench in the mountains, golfers are able to look across the valley and not just up at the mountains as typical of most valley courses. This provides different scenery and perspective than most golfers are used to.

"It's more like being in a helicopter than it is standing down in the valley or driving a car," Furber said.

These design process challenges became benefits for golfers who now love to play SilverTip's incredibly scenic and unabashedly difficult course.

The fact that SilverTip resides at 5,000 feet above sea level is one of several ways the course's setting plays into a golfer's game. The lower density of the air can force adjustments when players equip themselves with clubs for a trip to the mountain course. Balls really will fly farther. Just ask any professional baseball pitcher who's thrown against the Rockies at Colorado's Coors Field.

"It can travel as much as two percent per 1,000 feet," Furber said. In other words, at SilverTip, any given drive or approach shot can travel almost 10 percent farther than the same shot at sea level.

Other challenges include the course's tough 153 Slope rating from the back tees and its 7,200 yards of distance.

Boasting one of the greatest elevation changes of any course in the world, SilverTip has several holes with over 100 feet of elevation change. It has over 600 feet of elevation change over the whole course. This can make judging distances much more difficult.

"That's probably double most other golf experiences," Furber said. "I know several golf courses we've worked on with 250 to 300 feet of elevation change. [This is] quite a bit more dramatic."

As promised, elevation change is only one of the many elements of this course that are a bit more dramatic than the average golfer is used to.

"The scenery is so big and bold," Furber said.

Furber's definition of scenery goes beyond the course's mountain backdrop, pine trees and bushes. Several wildlife corridors run through SilverTip. In fact, SilverTip is named after a rare type of grizzly bear and at the top of the resort's home page (silvertipresort.com), a picture of a bear takes up almost as much space as pictures of the golf course. The chance of running across some area wildlife is much higher at SilverTip than at other courses.

"We quite often see bear and deer and elk, coyotes and lynx and different things in the area," Furber said.

Designing a course like SilverTip was not some lifelong dream of Furber's, but he did have some experience previously working with mountains. He continues to design challenging mountain courses. Along with working on Europe's highest course, Zuoz-Madulain in Switzerland, Furber has designed other Rocky Mountain courses including Trickle Creek Golf Course in British Columbia which opened in 1993 on the slopes of North Star Mountain.

"You take the challenge when it presents itself, but we didn't go looking for it because not many people would want to undertake it," Furber said.

The challenge that Furber undertook with SilverTip has not gone unnoticed. It has translated into a similar type of challenge for golfers who choose to play the course. SilverTip's very nature is "extreme." Furber agrees that this may be the only word that can encapsulate what the course is all about.

"It is extreme," Furber said. "I think the other part of 'the extreme' is the reaction of the people. It is extreme to many people in the way it presents itself and the way it plays and in the way that it appeals to your senses."

SilverTip seems to appeal to quite a few people. In 1999, it ranked as the second best new course in Canada according to Golf Digest.

SilverTip is not making ridiculous claims when it says it is an "extreme golf experience." In fact, it may be an understatement. Its marriage of nature, mountain landscape and challenging golf are making SilverTip, not only one of the most exciting courses around, but also extremely popular.