Golf courses being developed.

Next spring Don Missere expects to be standing on the first tee of this city's first public 18-holer, Crimson Ridge, ready to launch a golf ball down the middle of the fairway.

"I've been dreaming of this all my life," says Missere, a 53-year-old chartered accountant for BDO Dunwoody and local tournament golfer. "It's only in the last 10 years I've gotten serious about this."

He's heading up a group of private investors, including NHL goaltender John Vanbiesbrouck, who have poured $5 million into creating one of the most "breathtaking courses" in Northern Ontario. Crimson Ridge is one of three planned, publicly accessible courses either under construction or in the proposal stage in the Sault area.

One blustery February afternoon, Missere takes a visitor in his pickup truck down a plunging ravine road carved out of the 335-acre bush property that sits high on a ridgeline overlooking the city and the St. Mary's River, a few kilometres to the south.

Sweeping his hand out over the snowy, marshmallow landscape, he asks the visitor to envision the elevated tees, the dips and rolls of the wide bluegrass fairways, the landing pad-sized greens of bent grass and the ponds and waterfalls framed by stands of maple and oak. "It's absolutely gorgeous up here with all the fall colours," Missere says.

For about a decade, Missere had contemplated getting the money together to build a premiere public course. Together with his partner, Gil Edwards, formerly the head greenskeeper at the exclusive Sault Ste. Marie Golf Club, they scoped out properties before settling on the sandy slopes at Fourth Line and Brule Road.

Work got underway last June and proceeded into the winter months with the laying of the main irrigation line, construction of ponds and some earthwork, which included some rock blasting.

Missere views the course as a vital quality of life issue to keep local golfers closer to home and to target a more upscale golf clientele willing to spend a few dollars more to play on a premiere course.

"I think the course is important for the sake of the community," Missere says. "Right now a doctor or a businessman can't get on the Sault golf course and can't become a member. There's a waiting list of over 100. The local market's covered on the low end, but what's missing is a quality course for people who are willing to pay the extra money to play."

Though Crimson Ridge is being touted as a championship-calibre course, a par 72 with a 6,900-yard layout from the pro tees, course designer Kevin Holmes, a Sault native working for Toronto landscape architects MBTW has attempted to make the course playable for all levels, yet challenging with some forced carries off the tee.

John Gibbs had the same eagle eye for a property's potential when he first viewed a 330-acre parcel of rolling bush land on rustic St. Joseph's Island, about a 40-minute drive east of the Sault.

"I had a vision," says the 48-year-old home builder and twice-weekly golfer in explaining his Field of Dreams-like epiphany. "I could see the golf course, the clubhouse, I could see where everything fit. Kevin (Holmes, the course designer) refined my plans a bit, but it was like a power beyond me."

Fed by natural springs, the course is appropriately named Island Springs. Gibbs and his wife Marlene, a registered nurse, are putting the finishing touches to open the front nine of their 18-hole course in July.

The sandy soil of the 10th Side Road property was tailor-made for golf, he says, fed by natural springs pumping out 600 gallons (2724 litres) a minute. The course, which will play a par 36, 3342 yards, will be enlarged to the full 18 of 6874 yards by 2004. The course will feature a driving range with a chip shot practice area and a clubhouse with a restaurant. They will employ about 20.

A third possible course development is in the city's northeast on conservation authority land in an area known as the Hiawatha Highlands. Yenway, the Sudbury-based golf course management company of the award-winning Timberwolf Golf Club in the Greater City of Sudbury, have the inside track after their expression of interest was accepted by the authority's board of directors early last year.

The proposed property lies on a 350-acre bush property criss-crossed with ski and hiking trails.

Although the next steps involve a full slate of environmental assessments, Yenway chief executive officer John Alpaugh would prefer to wait until Crimson Ridge opens next year to determine if the Sault market can support two upper-end specialty courses that would draw locals, tourists and American businessmen.