Merritt Golf Club

Merritt sits in the Nicola Valley, a high-desert plateau in BC's Interior where the climate runs drier and hotter than almost anywhere else in the province. It's cattle country more than ski country, and the landscape — open grasslands, sage-brushed hills, ponderosa pines — gives golf here a character distinctly different from the rain-softened courses of the Lower Mainland or the mountain-resort tracks of the Okanagan's edge. The Thompson and Nicola rivers converge nearby, and that wide, semi-arid terrain shapes how courses in this region look and play.

Merritt Golf Club is a private members' club serving a relatively small but passionate local golf community. That kind of club tends to develop a strong identity — regulars who know every bounce and break, a course maintained with pride by people who actually play it, and a social fabric that makes the 19th hole as important as the 1st tee.

Without a major resort or destination draw, a club like this earns its loyalty round by round, season by season, from the people who call it home.