Best Golf Courses In Michigan

Best Golf Courses In Michigan

Some of the best golf courses in Michigan have taken inspiration from golf's history, whereas some others have added an engagingly quirky modern twist to the game’s landscape. The Wolverine State’s spectacular terrain of dense natural forests, heather-lined highlands and Great Lakes shorelines has been deployed by some top golf architects to craft some impressive, imaginative layouts.

Arcadia Bluffs Golf Club (Bluffs)

• Location: Arcadia
• Designed by: Warren Henderson and Rick Smith
• Par: 73
• Yardage: 7,300 Yards
• Green fee: $75-$230
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This coastline layout has been crafted to resemble the landscape of a traditional links course  and offers views of Lake Michigan from its windswept, wide fairways dotted with their sod-walled bunkers en route to some huge greens. The course runs along more that 3,000ft of coastline and the elevation change from the highest to lowest point on the layout is 200ft.

Bay Harbor Golf Club (Links/Quarry)

• Location: Bay Harbor
• Designed by: Arthur Hills
• Par: 72
• Yardage: 6,845 Yards
• Green fee: $250-$440
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There are three nine-hole courses here, of which the best combination is Links and Quarry. Links runs along the shoreline of Lake Michigan, and Quarry is routed through a shale quarry, and includes 40ft gorges, stone cliffs, natural ponds and a waterfall.

Crystal Downs Country Club

• Location: Frankfort
• Designed by: Alister Mackenzie
• Par: 70
• Yardage: 6,518 Yards
• Green fee: Private
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This course was designed by Alister Mackenzie, but laid out by his assistant Perry Maxwell, who stayed on site. It is said that Maxwell added to his boss’s designs, enhancing the quirkiness of this course. The fairways tumble along like a storm-tossed Ocean surface and the steep green gradients reflect an age when putting surfaces were slower. Great, memorable, imaginative, and often tricky, holes abound. Designs flamboyantly exploit the hilly terrain, such as the uphill par-3 9th to a green sliced across a steep hillside, where anything struck left of target tumbles away, and anything played conservatively off to the right risks being captured by a bunker which looms over the putting surface. The 13th green is kidney – or maybe even boomerang-shaped, although one reviewer has claimed the green itself is a dogleg.

Forest Dunes Golf Club (Forest Dunes)

• Location: Roscommon
• Designed by: Tom Weiskopf
• Par: 72
• Yardage: 7,116 Yards
• Green fee: $115-$185
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The front nine is threaded through corridors flanked by red and jack pines, some of them centuries old, and then the back nine runs takes to open meadowland and sandy wastelands. But common features to both nines are found in the bunkers, water hazards and undulating greens. The strong closing trio of holes kicks off with a long par 3 requiring a carry over dunes.

Forest Dunes (The Loop – Black)

• Location: Roscommon
• Designed by: Tom Doak
• Par: 70
• Yardage: 6,704 Yards
• Green fee: $115-$185
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Tom Doak has laid out a ‘reversible’ golf course called The Loop which has 18 greens that are approached from different directions. Golfers take on The Loop in a clockwise rotation one day, which is the Black routing, and the next day golfers are presented with the Red routing which runs counter-clockwise. Although the course opened in 2016, it was designed and built to ape the earliest courses. Little earth was moved during the construction, and there are no formal tee boxes, only teeing areas, nor are there water hazards or buggies on the course.

Lochenheath Golf Club

• Location: Traverse City
• Designed by: Steve Smyers
• Par: 72
• Yardage: 7,280 Yards
• Green fee: Private
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The name is a pun on two Scottish words ‘loch’ for lake, and ‘heath’ for moorland. The notion was craft a course in homage to a Scottish links on a former cherry orchard on bluff overlooking East Grand Traverse Bay. But the result, although appealing, is more American than Scottish in style.

Lost Dunes Golf Club

• Location: Bridgman
• Designed by: Tom Doak
• Par: 71
• Yardage: 6,905 Yards
• Green fee: Private
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Lost Dunes was created from an old sand quarry – which has left it with two deep lakes and well as several expansive sandy waste areas – and is encased by forested sand dunes on three sides. The course features wide fairways and severely undulating greens and some forced carries. A downside to the location is the interstate highway which slices through the layout.

Marquette Golf Club (Greywalls)

• Location: Marquette
• Designed by: Mike DeVries
• Par: 71
• Yardage: 6,828 Yards
• Green fee: $105-$180
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A course created over dramatic but difficult terrain – 40,000 cubic yards of soil was shifted, and 3,000 cubic yards of rock blasted. The layout weaves and tumbles its way through wetlands, dodging rocky outcrops and skirting wetlands with dramatic elevation changes and views of Lake Superior as you make you way round. “The routing for the course was very difficult,” explains DeVries, “in that I had to find good golf holes that fit together and produced a good rhythm and flow to the course and not just one ‘wonder-hole’ after another, with rock everywhere and views of Lake Superior.”

Oakland Hills Country Club (South)

• Location: Bloomfield Hills
• Designed by: Donald Ross
• Par: 70
• Yardage: 7,395 Yards
• Green fee: Private
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The club was founded in 1916 and in 1918 Walter Hagen was appointed the club’s first pro at ‘$300 per month plus any profits from the sale of golf equipment’. The long, bunker-strewn parkland South course, nicknamed ‘The Monster’, has hosted the US Open six times, the US PGA Championship three times and the 2004 Ryder Cup.

Point O’Woods Golf & Country Club

• Location: Benton Harbor
• Designed by: Robert Trent Jones Sr
• Par: 72
• Yardage: 7,075 Yards
• Green fee: Private
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The typical green here is long and thin, often with a narrow entrance and flanked by large bunkers. The fairways tend to be long and thin and edged with bunkers, and also sometimes ponds. The most dramatic hole is the long par-3 9th with a long thin bunker-fringed angled green high above a lake over which the tee shot is played.