Sunday River Golf Club

Overview: Sunday River Golf Club is a Robert Trent Jones Jr. mountain course in Newry, western Maine. The routing is carved into the western Maine hills, with elevation changes, long views and the Carrabassett River forming a distinctive landscape framework. Jones used the topography to create changing approach angles and a sequence of holes that rarely reads as flat or repetitive. The course can be played as a resort round, but its identity is strongly architectural: fairway shelves, hillside lies and green complexes ask players to account for the land before choosing the most aggressive line. Autumn colour and the surrounding peaks add visual variety without replacing the strategic work of the course.

History: The Robert Trent Jones Jr. designed course opened in 2004 as part of the Sunday River resort’s summer expansion. The resort’s historical timeline records the opening directly, and the club has continued to operate as a separate golf facility alongside Sunday River’s winter mountain activities. In 2019 the resort began managing the golf club, and the course was purchased as part of a 2020 effort to improve the facility and secure its long-term future. Those later changes belong to management history, while the original 2004 routing remains the foundation of the course profile.

Did You Know? The first six holes of the back nine frame the Carrabassett River and were named the “String of Pearls” by Robert Trent Jones Jr. The sequence is a useful example of the design using a real landscape feature to connect several holes rather than treating the river as a single crossing.