Lookout Mountain sits high above Chattanooga, on the Tennessee-Georgia border, and it plays like a promise that took the better part of a century to keep. It was meant to be the centrepiece of Fairyland, a grand resort community on top of the mountain, and the club that grew around it was first called the Fairyland Club. The name suits the place. Now and then a cloud rolls through, and on a clear day the horizon fills with neighbouring mountains and more than one state. But the early story was nothing like a fairy tale. Doug Stein, a local and a longtime member, called it "nothing but a series of catastrophes." Seth Raynor drew the plans, and it was among the last courses he designed before he died in 1926. His assistant, Charles Banks, took those detailed drawings and built the course without him. The mountain resisted at every step. Solid granite made construction slow and expensive. The topsoil and grass seed hauled up the slopes washed away several times, and a rainstorm carried off a number of holes before the course had even opened. Then came the Great Depression. Banks finished the course, but the version that went into the ground was never quite the one Raynor had imagined, and over the decades even that slowly faded into a shell of itself. In the mid-1990s the club came across a replica of Raynor's original plan, a drawing that had been thought lost. With some clever sleuthing, Stein traced the original to the Edward E. Betts Engineering office, the firm that had helped produce the land survey for Raynor some seventy years earlier. It measured six feet wide by four feet tall, and it was extremely detailed. Here, on paper, was the course the mountain was supposed to have. In 1997 Brian Silva was asked to complete the Raynor vision. He refurbished bunkers, added new sand traps, and restored greens to their original dimensions. The Biarritz 4th, the Short 6th, the Alps 11th and the Redan 13th came to show off the talents of the man who first drew them. Yet finishing Lookout Mountain was also a long devotion. Stein's drive and passion, alongside King Oehmig, Brian Silva, Gil Hanse, Tyler Rae and Kyle Franz, eventually brought the course to the 1925 Raynor drawing that had never made it into the ground. At last they completed the course that never was. What stands there now is golf on a mountain in the fullest sense. Slopes tilt heavily, the terrain undulates, and the features are massive and bold. The classic Macdonald-Raynor templates appear at grand scale: Bottle, Biarritz, Short, Cape, Alps, Redan, Road, Eden, Double Plateau and Maiden. Recent tree clearing has opened long views across the whole course, and the severity of the landforms now lies in plain sight. Among everything Raynor drew, this is surely one of his boldest and most daring courses. Then there is the 6th, the shortest hole on the course. You climb a series of steps carved into a gigantic boulder to a small patch of turf twelve feet up, and you begin the hole from the top of the rock. It is a one-of-a-kind perch. From up there it is easy to feel the whole history of the place at once: the granite that fought the builders, the drawing that was thought lost, and the long road that finally brought the mountain the course it was always meant to have.