Boyne Highlands is your Northern Michigan home base. Four championship courses under one roof means you could spend an entire week here and still want more. The Heather, designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., is the crown jewel with tight tree-lined doglegs, elevated greens, and three par threes played over water. The Donald Ross Memorial pays tribute to the man himself, featuring replica holes from his most celebrated works including Oakland Hills and Seminole. You get the architecture without needing a member to vouch for you.

Treetops was built on terrain most architects said could not be done. Steep elevation changes, dense forest, and tee shots that make your stomach drop in the best way possible. The Rick Smith Signature Course leads the championship lineup while Threetops exists in a category entirely its own. Consistently ranked among the best par 3 courses in the world, it hosted the ESPN Par 3 Shootout for eight years and became the stage for one of the most unforgettable moments in golf history. In 2001 Lee Trevino made an ace on the 7th hole and walked away with $1,090,000 in a single swing. Nicklaus, Mickelson, Floyd, Couples, and Palmer have all competed here. You can walk the same tee boxes as some of golf's greatest legends.

Ranked 16th in the country on Golf Digest's Top 100 Greatest Public Courses list, Arcadia Bluffs is the highlight of any Northern Michigan trip and honestly the highlight of any golf trip period. There is a moment on the back nine where you step onto the tee box and Lake Michigan opens up 150 feet below you and everything just stops. The wind off the water, the native fescue swaying, 40 sod-walled bunkers framing fairways that spill toward the shoreline. Links golf in the American Midwest, every bit as extraordinary as it sounds. The South Course, ranked 53rd nationally, trades the drama of the lake for pure strategic challenge.

Pete Dye took 560 acres of flat Wisconsin coastline and sculpted something that looks like it was ripped straight from the west coast of Ireland. Over 100 pot bunkers, two miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, fescue dunes that seem to breathe in the wind. The Straits Course has hosted four PGA Championships and the 2021 Ryder Cup where Team USA delivered the largest winning margin since 1967. You are not just playing a golf course here. You are playing one of the most significant venues in the history of the game. The Irish Course just inland is quieter, more nuanced, and every bit as punishing.

Ten minutes from Whistling Straits and a completely different world. Where the Straits is wide open and windswept, Blackwolf Run is glacially carved river valleys, oak savannahs, and bluffs that frame every tee shot. Pete Dye called it the most naturally suited piece of land for golf he had ever seen before he designed a single hole. The River Course has hosted two US Women's Opens. The Meadow Valleys is the most playable of the four Kohler courses and the one most golfers fall in love with on the back nine. The Baths is a ten hole par 3 short course that opened in 2021 and gives you a chance to breathe between the big rounds.

The only Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course in Wisconsin, built on a former dairy farm across 400 acres of woodlands, wetlands, and a winding river. Just 20 minutes north of Kohler, it is consistently ranked in Golf Digest's Top 100 public courses for over 20 years. The finishing hole carries over a pond to a green tucked behind wetlands. Close enough to play in the morning before an afternoon round at Whistling Straits.

There are three courses at Sea Pines Resort and together they make up one of the most complete golf properties in the country. The anchor is Harbour Town. But the full picture is even better than most people realize.

Pete Dye designed Harbour Town in 1969 with Jack Nicklaus as his design consultant and it was a complete departure for the game at the time. No mounds, no elevated tees, no elevated greens. Tiny greens hung atop railroad ties directly over water hazards, trees blocking direct shots from every angle, and fairways framed by live oaks and palmettos. Arnold Palmer won the very first tournament ever played here and every year since the PGA Tour returns for the RBC Heritage the week after the Masters. The 18th hole is one of the most recognizable finishes in golf, a par 4 along Calibogue Sound with the iconic red and white Harbour Town Lighthouse standing behind the green. You have seen it on television a hundred times. Playing it in person with the wind coming off the sound is something else entirely.

Heron Point is the second Pete Dye design on the property and gives you a completely different experience, with dramatic mounding, shifting elevations, and water-guarded greens that Dye himself reshaped from the ground up in 2007. Atlantic Dunes by Davis Love III is the most scenic of the three, a sweeping seaside layout of natural sand dunes, coquina shells, and marsh grasses with one of only two oceanfront holes on the entire island. Love called Sea Pines one of his all-time favorite places to play and the redesign earned National Course of the Year in 2018. Three courses, one property, and enough golf to keep you busy for an entire week without leaving the resort.

If Sea Pines is where you go for prestige, Palmetto Dunes is where you go for variety. Three championship courses, three completely different personalities, all on the same property designed by three architects who each left their own distinct mark on the island.

The Robert Trent Jones course winds through a 12-mile lagoon system and features one of only two oceanfront holes on all of Hilton Head, the par 5 10th where the green sits right at the edge of the Atlantic. The Arthur Hills course is built on continuous lines of dunes and palmetto trees with 10 holes alongside the water, and Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson even played here during their college years. The George Fazio course is the island's only par 70 and considered by many to be the truest championship test on the island, a demanding layout of long par 4s guarded by bunkers and water that will expose every gap in your game. All three courses have been named South Carolina's Golf Course of the Year at different points.

Sand Hollow is the one that started the conversation about St. George as a serious golf destination. The Championship Course winds through the desert on a front nine that is solid and fun but saves everything for later. Starting at hole 11 the course climbs along a canyon rim with cliff drops just off the fairway, red rock formations framing every approach, and Zion sitting in the distance like a painting. Three of Sand Hollow's holes made Golf Digest's list of America's top 100 holes. Hole 15 is the one people talk about, a short par 3 nicknamed The Devil's Throat where the tee box is set between two rock formations creating a tunnel effect that focuses everything on a green suspended over a canyon.

Tom Weiskopf spent his career designing 73 golf courses across the world. Black Desert was his last. He was diagnosed with cancer as construction began and never saw the finished product. What he left behind is extraordinary. Lush fairways carved directly out of ancient black lava fields with 360 degree views of red sandstone cliffs on every hole. The contrast of deep green grass against ink-black lava rock is unlike anything else in the game and television cameras fell in love with it immediately. In 2024 it became the first course in Utah history to host a PGA Tour FedEx Cup event, bringing professional golf back to the state for the first time in over 60 years. The carts play Weiskopf's own narration hole by hole, his voice describing what he was thinking when he designed each shot, serving as a goodbye letter from one of the greatest architects who ever lived.

Most golfers playing St. George do Sand Hollow and Black Desert and call it a trip. The ones who find Copper Rock come back talking about it differently. Set in the shadow of the Hurricane Cliffs with sweeping views of the Pine Valley Mountains, Zion, and the surrounding desert, Copper Rock opened in 2020 and has already hosted LPGA Tour events on a layout that very few people outside the region know about. The back nine climbs to dramatic elevation with a manmade stream winding through several holes before both nines finish at a shared double green separated by a pond. The par 3 17th is a drop shot from the highest point on the course with an aerial view of the entire property spread out below you. Golf Digest named it the best course in Southern Utah three years running.

Sunriver is your home base for Bend golf. Sixty-three holes across four courses, mountain views from nearly every tee box, and Crosswater sitting at the center of it all as one of the finest public access golf courses in America. Golf Digest has ranked Crosswater among the country's 100 greatest courses and one visit tells you exactly why. The course winds through 600 acres of woodlands and carefully preserved wetlands with the Deschutes and Little Deschutes Rivers crossing your path up to seven times in a single round. Towering ponderosa pines frame every hole, the Cascade peaks sit on the horizon, and the whole property has a wild, untouched quality that feels like golf was discovered here rather than built. The Meadows and Woodlands courses give you two more excellent rounds without ever leaving the property.

David McLay Kidd designed Bandon Dunes and then moved to Bend. In 2008 he built Tetherow on a stretch of fire-scarred land just outside downtown on a mission to create something that had never existed in America before. A genuine Scottish heathland links course in the Oregon high desert, with fescue fairways flowing across rolling volcanic terrain, gnarly bunkers carved into the hillsides, and panoramic views of the Cascade peaks including the Three Sisters, Broken Top, and on a clear day even Mount Hood on the horizon. There is not another course in the country that looks or plays like this. Firm and fast, ball-above-and-below-your-feet lies, and greens that demand creativity and humility in equal measure. One of the most polarizing and memorable rounds you will ever play.

Formerly known as Pronghorn Resort, Juniper Preserve sits on the high desert plateau east of Bend with canyon views that stretch for miles in every direction. Two championship courses, one by Tom Fazio and one by Jack Nicklaus, on a property that feels more like a private club than public resort. The Nicklaus course in particular is built around dramatic canyon terrain with elevation changes and desert rock formations framing approach shots in a way that is completely unlike anything at Sunriver or Tetherow. If you want the bucket list resort experience with the full high desert canyon aesthetic, Juniper Preserve is the answer.