Stand on the first tee at The Keep and the ground seems to fall away in every direction. Wind brushes your sleeves, a blue gulf of sky opens beyond the cliff edge, and, as co-designer Bill Bergin puts it, you can “see 75 miles.” This is mountain golf at The McLemore that refuses the usual compromises. Built atop a plateau on Lookout Mountain in northwest Georgia., The Keep is a cliffside stunner with five holes flirting with the rim – and a personality all its own.
“Mike Keiser famously said, one course is a curiosity and two is a destination,” says Craig Falanga, McLemore’s head of sales and marketing. “We’ve got a destination.”
Thirty minutes south of Chattanooga, Tenn., The Keep officially opened October 1 after a year of preview play, joining the renovated Highlands Course and the new Cloudland hotel to complete McLemore’s above-the-clouds triad.
Bergin, a former tour player who co-designed both courses with Rees Jones, calls The Keep “one of a kind.” It’s open and wind-swept, yet not linksland; a mountain course with rock underfoot, yet remarkably walkable.
The team moved surprisingly little earth – “a tough build that looks easy” – and left expressive rock outcrops where they belonged, fitting the course into the Lookout Mountain vernacular where houses “feel like they’re growing out of a rock formation.”
The result is both dramatic and playable. Yardage stretches beyond 7,700 from the tips but scales down to roughly 4,200, with Stadium zoysia providing the firm rollout that makes wind part of the chess match. Holes are distinct and memorable, offering a scoring chance “each time we climb a hill,” Bergin notes. Every hole is easily recalled after the round, but some of the most memorable include the split-fairway, par-5 second; the long, cliffside par-3 eighth with reverse-Redan intent and a kick-slope that echoes the mountain across the valley; the rock-guarded 17th that “looks like Disney World – except everything’s real,” Bergin says; and a fantastic finisher where the wind can turn your approach from wedge to 5-iron.
If Highlands put McLemore on the map, The Keep redraws it. The Highlands’ 18th – reborn in 2021 during a Jones–Bergin renovation – is already a star, ranked among the nation’s best finishing holes for its cliff-hugging drama. That hole, Bergin admits, unlocked everything that followed: the siting of the hotel, the confidence to route along the rim, the invitation to think bigger. On Highlands, the architects also “created more room to play less-than-perfect golf,” a philosophy The Keep amplifies by pairing visual theater with forgiving corridors and smart angles.
McLemore’s destination credentials extend beyond the scorecard. Falanga points out the rare convenience: “For a destination golf resort to be 30 minutes from a metropolitan area is pretty unique.”
Chattanooga – booming with an aquarium, museums, a growing food scene, and Civil War sites – is down the mountain, while Cloudland crowns the property with a Curio Collection hotel (opened in 2024), cliff-edge infinity pool, full-service spa, and four restaurants.
Golfers and families find options: a six-hole short course, a lighted Himalayas-style putting course, and a Toptracer range. The lodging mix includes the hotel and roughly 30 private homes on rental, making buddy trips and couples’ escapes equally at home.
That constant horizon might distract you, but it’s also the point. At The Keep, the game and the setting are in dialogue: wind versus angle, nerve versus edge, modern playability etched into ancient stone. Two courses, one vision – curiosity no more, a destination at last.