Standing at the top of Georgia’s Lookout Mountain offers a genuine setting–and feeling–of getting away. Its hillsides are covered in pine, birch and oak trees, and at nearly 2,400 feet in elevation, the mountain provides views of seven states. As my wife and I rose above the clouds to the summit of Lookout Mountain, where Cloudland at McLemore Resort awaited us, we were left nearly speechless. We could only say to each other, “Look at that.”
Cloudland boasts two golf courses and a new Curio Collection by Hilton hotel that opened in February, the combination of which the resort hopes will help stake its claim as a new golfing destination in the southeast. The lucrative golf travel business has been booming since the pandemic: The National Golf Foundation reports that in 2023, a record 531 million rounds were played, surpassing the 529 million high set in 2021, which spiked because golf was one of the few group activities that allowed for social distancing. Furthermore, the NGF reports that “rounds are trending more than 10 percent ahead of the five-year, pre-pandemic average from 2015-19.”
While mountain golf as a concept isn’t new, good mountain golf is difficult to come by because of the terrain. The developers of Cloudland, however, are native to the area, which already boasts a handful of elite private golf courses that take advantage of Lookout Mountain’s natural beauty.
The Cloudland development was sparked by a desire to take advantage of its setting and its reputation as a hub for outdoor enthusiasts, Duane Horton, president of Scenic Land Company, the developer of Cloudland, told Observer.
The addition of the Cloudland Hilton hotel is the culmination of a years-long process. Scenic Land bought an existing resort in 2017 and rebranded it a year later as McLemore, with one golf course and some adjacent golf cottages. In the fall of 2024, on the heels of the hotel opening, they opened their second course, The Keep, for preview play, which, unlike its older brother, hugs the cliffs of Lookout Mountain. Golfers play to a number of infinity greens, which, from a distance, appear to fall at the cliff’s edge, just like an infinity pool. Long-range views of the Smoky Mountains abound from every vantage point on The Keep, and a stretch of holes from eight to 11 allow golfers to traverse the edge of the mountain as they play.
While those holes are the prized ones of the course, architect Bill Bergin made good use of the setting to create tumbling fairways away from the cliffs’ edges and holes with varying elevations, while still keeping the course walkable. One of The Keep’s charms is that you play through exposed rocky outcropping; the contrast of those exposed granite slabs and green grass makes for an appealing and arresting golf landscape.
The Highlands Course is the resort’s original course and boasts what the resort claims on the scorecard as “the best finishing hole in golf.” This is because golfers put their pegs in the ground right at the edge or ridge atop the mountain, with purple-dotted mountains hugging the left side of the fairway off in the distance until you reach the nestled green. The Highlands Course has much tighter playing corridors, with pine trees marking the edges of the playing area from hole to hole. It has a serpentine routing over the ground and the exposed rock on this course provides the same texture as The Keep, but also seems to demonstrate the land was more difficult to find and place 18 holes of golf.
The resort breaks the course up into three distinct regions: canyons, highlands and the cliff edges. Aside from the 18th, the standout holes on the Highlands are its collection of par 3 holes. My favorite is the third hole, which is a short par 3 to a large, sloped green guarded by two bunkers that offer little chance of recovery. The hillside rocks above the green provide an amphitheater-like setting for this challenging hole.
After the golf is finished for the day, the new 245-room hotel–and its dining options–provides plenty of ways to recharge. The hotel is a picture of modern comfort, with an abundance of seating in its large common areas, from high-back leather chairs to deep couches with large tan-leather ottomans. The library, situated just off the entrance, features backlit bookshelves with a collection of classics ranging from Hemingway to Woolf, as well as modern selections of nonfiction and contemporary fiction. Couches around coffee tables and plush swivel chairs with adjacent small tables made this a great room to catch up on some reading in the early morning, while most of the hotel still slept. The only thing missing was a throw blanket
At the hotel’s terrace level, on the ground floor, a large wooden topographic cutout of the mountain range hangs on the wall, while Eames-inspired chairs invite guests to sit and visit with one another. The mixture of textures is both modern and cozy, and large floor lamps with built-in tables offer plenty of room to set down a cocktail. Guests can step outside to the pool deck to take in the spectacle of the mountains before them—at this elevation, the horizon takes on a different hue of blue and purple, as if saturated in their colors.
For dinner on our first night, we visited The Creag in the main clubhouse (order the hushpuppies, filet and caramel cloud mousse) and watched the supermoon rise up from behind a ridge. The sky was all peach and orange, and the moon glimmered higher and higher until we were under its white glow. Guests, including ourselves, rushed outside to film the spectacle, take selfies and share posts.
The next day, we went off-property to visit Cloudland Canyon State Park, where a series of trails allow you to hike through the nearly 4,000-acre site. The Waterfalls Trail was the perfect morning exercise to burn off our dinner from the night before. The 1.8-mile roundtrip trail leads to Cherokee Falls and involves some 600 steps on the climb back up to the mountain’s rim.
The property’s proximity to parks and outdoor pursuits wasn’t an accident in the planning process. According to Horton, it was part of the initial overall concept, as well as to take advantage of Lookout Mountain’s proximity to growing population centers nearby. Chattanooga is only 35 minutes away from the resort, and Cloudland is also easily accessible from Atlanta, Nashville, Knoxville, Birmingham and Huntsville.
Like other resort communities in the southeast, such as the Cliffs and Palmetto Bluff, Cloudland includes a real estate component and a private members club. The golf is part of that club, and the only public play it offers is to hotel guests. Like those other communities, Horton says, golf was a driver from the outset. “We believed the uniqueness of offering an accessible mountaintop course that was both fair and dramatic would be a draw and create additional demand for the resort community by guests and members,” he said, noting that most mountain courses are not actually located atop a mountain, and none boast the expansive views of the Blue Ridge Mountains found at Cloudland.
On our last day at the resort, we took our kids, who are aged eight and six, out to The Cairn, a complimentary six-hole short course off the main clubhouse, and watched them hit shots between 40 and 80 yards to real greens from real tees. While there were plenty of golfers walking around the property, many watching college football games at night, there were a lot of couples and families, as well. We might have been taking our kids to bed, but the party was just getting started on the first floor—fire pits were lit up outside, and drinks were ordered inside and to enjoy alfresco. There was something for everyone and even our kids, back in the room, were already asking when we were going to come back.
