Elkwater Park Golf Club

Elkwater Park Golf Club sits within Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, the only park in Canada to straddle a provincial boundary — shared between Alberta and Saskatchewan. The Cypress Hills plateau rises dramatically above the surrounding prairies, a forested island in a sea of grassland that somehow escaped the last ice age's glacial scouring. That geological quirk left behind an elevated, wooded landscape unlike anything else for hundreds of kilometers in any direction, and the golf course reflects that singularity: tree-lined fairways and rolling terrain that feel genuinely surprising given how flat the neighboring plains stretch toward the horizon.

The course itself is a modest, unpretentious layout that serves the park's recreational community — campers, families, and local golfers who return season after season for the setting as much as the golf. It plays through mature mixed forest with the kind of relaxed, unhurried atmosphere that a provincial park naturally encourages. Scoring opportunities are there, but errant shots into the timber will test your patience.

Medicine Hat, the nearest city of any size, sits roughly an hour's drive west. This corner of southeastern Alberta is cattle country and short-grass prairie, which makes the elevated cool-air retreat of Cypress Hills feel like a genuine escape — and the golf course a worthy reason to linger a little longer.