Designed by the Stones.
Restored by the people
who play it.

The Rossland Trail Country Club was organized on April 22, 1922 with S.G. Blaylock as its first president. The first course was on Floyd Ranch, the Water Hole, just above Warfield, on land loaned by the Consolidated Mining & Smelting Company at $1 a year.

The first clubhouse opened that July with afternoon tea and an evening dance. The club's first tournament was held September 16, 1922; entry fee fifty cents.

A new site was selected in 1927 on the former Endersby Ranch, purchased by Cominco and leased to the club. Construction of the new log clubhouse cost roughly $8,000. The course measured 2,300 yards across nine holes.

The clubhouse and course opened together on May 5, 1928. The building has been in active use since, in 2010 it was formally recognized as a heritage place by the City of Rossland; the Canadian Register of Historic Places added it in January 2024 with the simple line that it is, today, the oldest remaining golf clubhouse in the entire Kootenay region.

Roy Stone arrived in Trail in the late 1930s, transferring with the 4X Bakery. His brother Reg followed on May 3, 1939, having sold his own bakery to McGavins. Reg had been club champion at sixteen, set a course record of thirty-two in 1931, and lost the 1937 Fraser Valley Amateur final to “Buck” Berry on the 45th hole.

Reg became Rossland-Trail’s first club professional. In 1946 the brothers founded the Rossland-Trail Open and inaugurated the first Pro-Am in the Kootenays. In 1949 Reg moved over to the City of Trail’s Parks & Recreation Board as superintendent; Roy succeeded him as the club’s pro and greenskeeper, a role he held until his retirement in 1978. Reg retired the following year.

Reg’s wife Ruby Stone won more than twenty championships in Kootenay women’s competition over two decades.

By the early 1960s the membership had outgrown nine holes in Rossland. Construction of the Birchbank course began in 1962 on Cominco-leased property along the west bank of the Columbia, between Trail and Castlegar. The first nine holes opened in 1964.

Roy designed the back nine and the new clubhouse himself, with assistance from Peter McIntyre. The work expanded Rossland-Trail to twenty-seven holes during construction and finished in the spring of 1969.

For more than four decades the property had belonged to Cominco. In 2004 the Rossland-Trail Country Club purchased the Birchbank property outright, the first time the course was owned by its members.

In 2006 Cominco sold the Rossland land. The original nine-hole course closed; the heritage clubhouse on Endersby Ranch is preserved as part of what became Redstone Resort. The club consolidated at Birchbank.

On June 1, 2018 the course was reconfigured to resemble Roy Stone’s original 1969 routing. The work also delivered rebuilt greens, relocated holes, new bunkers and tees, and the irrigation ponds now in play on holes 12 and 15.

The course you walk today is the one Roy laid out, on land Cominco loaned, owned by the people who play it.