Pros:
The park setting at James White is really nice in the summer, even though it's heavily treed they mow the grass between the trees and it's a beautiful quiet spot near the river.
The course is half nice new baskets, half old DGA Mach something baskets that are okay and do the job. All but I think 2 of the tee pads are natural, however, they're very good natural tee pads. They've had some fine red rock material added and they've been leveled out. There was only a couple holes where I even thought about the ground I was throwing from on the tee (i.e. a root or something in the mix).
And the icing on the cake with this course is that there's a bench at the tee of every hole, and a practice basket in a big space before the first tee.
The raw landscape here is a pretty good one for a course designer to work with, with fairly dense trees throughout but a lot of spacious gaps between to make use of as fairways.
Cons:
The biggest concern with this course for me is that, while I mentioned there are some spaces among the trees to be utilized for fairways, there's just not enough of them for 18 good holes. So there's a number of holes here that feel a bit forced to use up the space between the other, better holes. For example, hole 4 is so short you can basically jump putt from the tee. Other overly short holes (like 10 I think) use small windows through the trees to compensate.
Now in fairness, there's no avoiding that issue when you look at the size of the park, and the course covers as much of the park as it safely can. So it is what it is.
However, I have a big pet peeve when it comes to course design, and it's an issue here. I don't think "plinko" holes, where there's no real path to the basket so you have no choice but to throw into a grouping of trees and hope for the best, are very good course design. The course would benefit from the culling of a few select trees in this regard on a couple holes.
For example, hole 1 is a great long steady left to right shot, but about 2/3rds of the way there's a wall of evenly spaced trees with gaps of a couple feet. All you can really do is just throw at the basket and hope for the best; half the time you'll park it, half the time you'll hit and deflect. Take 2 of these little trees out and you've got yourself a legitimate fairway and a great little hole.
It's interesting to note that since the first time I played this course and now, this appears to have been done on hole 14. The removal of (I think) 2 trees creates an albeit still very narrow tunnel to hit. Interesting that they were able to do this in a public park... now I just wish they'd move the tee left so that going the whole length of the tunnel is more feasible.
There's a walking path that makes it's way straight through the middle of the course, which plays as OB path and beyond. This is fair play but it was a bit peculiar the way it comes into play on 18 as it seems to double as a fairway if you're going for the deuce.
Other Thoughts:
All in all I'd say I like this course and have enjoyed playing it when I travel to Fernie, but I don't think it's a good course to play a competitive game on as there's such a luck factor to it; missing tiny little windows was punishing depending on your bounce. I had a huge variance in the scores of my rounds depending on factors that seemed out of my control.
If you can accept that and have fun anyway, then by all means you would never want to drive through Fernie without stopping to play a round!