There's nothing wrong about the setting.

I’d love to be able to give the Lakemont Course at Stone Mountain Golf Club a higher score—parts of the property, in Georgia Stone Mountain Park, are straight beautiful, including five of the first six holes along Stone Mountain Lake and views of the big granite mound’s famous Confederate carving. There’s also no housing, and Marriott’s involvement has greatly stabilized both courses’ operations (the other being Robert Trent Jones’s 1969 Stonemont Course). But the routing just has too many glaring problems.

The first hole–make that the first shot–calls for a decent-sized carry over an inlet of the lake into the sideslope of a poorly defined fairway creased with a cart path, followed by a blind second shot. The distance between the 9^th green and the 10^th tee is the longest I’ve ever seen (half a mile as the crow flies; your path is longer than that) and makes the notion of walking an otherwise walkable course impossible. Part of the reason for this is that, under the current configuration, the club wanted to keep the original Trent Jones nines together, and LaFoy had to build his nines on the extreme two ends of the available property–not LaFoy’s fault but the result is ridiculous.

Several holes feature terrain too extreme for good golf (9, 12 and 14). And the little par-4 11^th that bends 90-degrees around a quarry is just goofy—it should have just been made into a pretty little par-3. I want to be careful in my criticism because I’m not sure what else LaFoy could have done given the situation, but its hard to believe there weren’t better solutions to the challenges here. (78)

Stone Mountain—Lakemont Course

Atlanta/Stone Mountain

Architect: John LaFoy

Year:1988