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Bristol Harbor The 14th hole at Bristol Harbour in western New York begins a breathtaking closing stretch in a distinctive woodland setting.

While playing the Cornell University golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones before World War II, I wondered at times what the great Jones saw in the land as he laid out the holes. Why does this fairway meander to the left when the landscape slopes to the right?

Then I came around the corner of a dogleg right and saw the canopy of trees protecting the right side of the green — a daunting but perfectly natural runway of leafy limbs arching outward, ever ready to snag any slice struck from a dead slice lie.

Ah, yes, so that’s what he saw. More impressive, he saw it as he was beginning his trade, before he was even 35.

The Cornell golf course, named for its designer, is one of several examples of Jones’s work in the Finger Lakes region of New York, an early breeding ground of Jones’s work close to his boyhood home, East Rochester.

The Robert Trent Jones golf trail in Alabama is perhaps his best-known collection of golf courses and deservedly attracts a steady stream of golfers from around the nation.

But Jones, who died in 2000 when he was 93, was so productive, it sometimes seems as if you could piece together a Jones golf trail almost anywhere.

For sentimental value and because it’s only a four-hour drive from New York City, the Finger Lakes area is my unheralded but worthy choice. And with the Jones courses generally next to lakeside mountains lined with deciduous trees, there may not be a better time to visit than the approaching fall months of September and October.

Jones certainly knew the terrain. He built his first course, Midvale Country Club just east of Rochester, in 1931 when he was 25. He built several more soon after, including the rolling course at Green Lakes State Park, a Depression-era project by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Jones himself operated that course for several years.

If the Finger Lakes were an incubator, the golf world became the benefactor as Jones built more than 500 courses worldwide, including at least one in 45 American states. But the Finger Lakes remained the starting point, and one wonders if the region shaped his designs for decades.

“I think it did if for no other reason than it has the perfect topography for golf,” said James Hansen, a history professor and director of the honors college at Auburn University who is writing a Jones biography. “He came away from the Finger Lakes with a certain aesthetic in his mind. He had a sense for what was beautiful and pleasing to the eye and how that translated to a golf course.

“I think it stayed with him all his life.”

In July, I composed my own tidy, four-course Jones Finger Lakes trail, with drives between the courses of no more than 80 minutes.

For starters, there is the Green Lakes State Park course in Fayetteville, N.Y., a sweeping swath of land winding through hills and swales that rarely lead to a flat lie, whether in the fairway or on the green. About 75 miles west, there is a 1972 Jones design at Bristol Harbour Resort, which sits on a dramatic bluff overlooking shimmering Canandaigua Lake. The Bristol Harbour course has striking lake views and five brilliant and distinctive closing holes in a classic woodland setting. Heading back toward Cornell, there is a little nine-hole course on the campus of tiny Wells College in the picturesque village of Aurora.

Jones’s wife, Ione, whom he met while attending nearby Cornell in the late 1920s, persuaded Jones to renovate the 50-year-old Wells College course at roughly the time he was laying out the holes at Bristol Harbour. Jones re-configured only three holes, but the results are obvious. From the tee of the second hole, for example, a grove and a brook hide the green. It is one of several blind tee shots.

The Wells College course is a short, country nine-holer in the classic sense, so don’t expect closely mowed fairways or manicured bunkers. Lower your expectations and enjoy the walk on another course overlooking a lake.

The final destination is Robert Trent Jones Golf Course at Cornell, which may be harder for the public golfer to experience because it is open to members of the extended Cornell community and their families, and, according to the club Web site, “anyone with an educational affiliation.” That can include a high school teacher in Iowa, or anywhere else, or a staff member at another college.

So if you can find a way to fit into one of those categories, or know someone who can, the Cornell course is the finest of Jones’s Finger Lakes offerings. The back nine was designed and opened first, in 1941. Jones completed the 18-hole routing in 1954.

Last year, Cornell received a voluminous collection of Jones’s papers, including his designs for hundreds of golf courses and about 400 boxes of correspondence and business records. In the documents was Jones’s transcript when he was a special student at Cornell — special because he designed a program that was considered the first golf architecture curriculum in American higher education.

Jones, referred to as the father of modern golf course architecture, studied agronomy and landscape architecture but also horticulture, hydraulics, surveying, economics and public speaking. The public speaking component was because golf architects needed skills of persuasion if they were going to raise money for construction during the Depression.

The Jones papers are not yet open to the public for research because they have to be organized. But Elaine Engst, the director of Cornell’s division of rare and manuscript collections, expects the collection to be exceedingly popular.

“A lot of people have contacted us already,” Engst said.

Teeing off on the 14th hole at Bristol Harbour on a pristine July day, I couldn’t imagine what Robert Trent Jones had in store for me. But striking my shot down the middle (or nearly so) seemed a suitable plan of attack.

Still, as I walked toward the ball in the fairway, I wondered: What did he see here?

Because I saw nothing.

And then I got to my ball and came upon the 80-foot drop from the fairway to a green enveloped by tall trees, a drop made even more devilish by the hole’s sharp turn to the left.

Ah, yes, so that’s what he saw.

And we can experience his vision forevermore.

From the archives, lessons on putting: