There’s golf in them there hills

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, September 6, 2006

Most people plan their golf getaways to historic, exotic or warm-weather locations.

Me, I went north.

Way north.

In fact, you’d have trouble getting much farther north for a game of golf than where I was a few weeks ago.

It happened during a week-long family vacation cruise to Alaska, with stops in Ketchikan, Juneau and Skagway. We did tours and general sight-seeing in Ketchikan and Juneau, but in Skagway my wife and kids strolled through town while I signed up for a golf excursion to the Meadow Lakes Golf and Country Club in Whitehorse, capital of Canada’s Yukon Territory.

The fee of $169 included transportation, green fees, a cart, lunch, shoes, clubs and three commemorative golf balls.

The outing began with a two-hour drive up and over 2,864-foot White Pass, which is one of two historic summits (nearby Chilkoot Pass is the other) used by prospectors bound for the Klondike gold fields in the late 1800s. The journey in those days was done mostly on foot, but today there is a winding two-lane highway that’s a bit perilous in places.

The summit is the Alaska-British Columbia border, and a half-hour later you reach the Yukon Territory, once the domain of 1950s television hero Sergeant Preston (“We always get our man”) and his faithful dog Yukon King.

I was one of 17 golf enthusiasts to leave Skagway that morning in a bus about the size of an airporter van. We departed under overcast skies, but our driver, a young man named Eric, promised us better weather in Whitehorse. Sure enough, there was sunshine with broken clouds by the time we reached the golf course.

Meadow Lakes G&CC is a modest nine-hole layout outside of Whitehorse and one of six golf courses in the Yukon Territory (only one is 18 holes). Located just off Highway 1, which is the Alaska-Canada Highway, Meadow Lakes G&CC is about what you’d expect a public golf course in the Yukon Territory to be. Not very long, not very challenging, and with blemishes here and there on the fairways and greens.

But after four days aboard a crowded cruise ship, the familiar sights of a golf course – any golf course – were welcome indeed. Even the rented clubs and the rented golf shoes had a delicious feel.

The biggest surprise that day turned out to be my playing partner, a man named Mark Robinson who lives on Whidbey Island and is a member at Useless Bay Golf and Country Club. Understand, Alaska cruise ships are filled with people from all over the world. After four days at sea I had yet to meet anyone from the West Coast, let alone the Seattle area.

So here I am at a golf course in Whitehorse, and I am paired with someone who works in Everett and reads The Herald. We were barely off the first tee and already I felt we were good friends.

Like me, Mark was delighted to be swinging a golf club, though neither of us, I must confess, played all that well. Some of that was probably the long bus ride, some of it the rented clubs, and some of it because we’re both fairly average golfers.

Not that it mattered much. The entire round, played in 60-degree weather, was still good fun.

I had wondered if we would see any wildlife, and sure enough we were visited by a red fox on the fourth hole. He trotted out onto the fairway, gave the two of us a curious look, and then went on his way.

My best moment came on the 200-yard, par-4 first hole, which was actually the sixth hole we played because of a shotgun start. From the tee I split the fairway with a 5-iron to the center of a sharp dogleg, then dropped a gentle sand wedge about 2 feet shy of the hole. After tapping in, I savored the exquisite joy of a birdie, which is the same in the Yukon as anywhere.

Doris “Sunshine” MacKenzie, the golf course manager, said most of the play at Meadow Lakes G&CC is local – “Golf is a very popular game here in Whitehorse,” she said – but there are also about 200 guests from cruise ships each week during the summer.

The season, she said, usually opens in late April and continues into early October, which is when the winter snows typically begin. Snow comes and goes until Christmas, but after Christmas it usually remains on the ground until the end of March.

“But as soon as the sun starts shining brightly here, we get a lot of daylight and the snow starts melting pretty quick,” she said. “We blow the snow off all the greens here. And we go out with the bulldozer and the cats, and we take it all off the fairways and the tee boxes as well.”

I asked about the fox, and was told the animal lives nearby and is fairly tame. As for other wildlife, she said, “we’ve had a bear show up occasionally, but nothing to worry about. He hasn’t shown up once for any of our tours, so that’s good. And we’ve had a couple of moose across the course, but that’s fairly rare, too.”

By mid-afternoon, Mark and I were back on the bus for the return trip to Skagway. We arrived on the waterfront at 4 p.m. and I had soon rejoined my family aboard the ship (ironically, Mark and I had arrived on different cruises; there are three or four ships in Skagway at any given time in the summer).

Later that night we pulled out of Skagway and started our long journey back to Seattle.

One of my goals in life is to collect new and different golf experiences, and a golf outing in the Yukon was certainly new and certainly different.

Do you suppose they play golf in Nome?