The best golf courses in Minnesota
The Minneapolis-St. Paul area might be one of the most underrated golf regions in the U.S. with six of the top seven courses in the state within a 30-minute drive. The courses span significant architectural eras: Interlachen, Minikahda and White Bear Yacht Club trace their golf back to the first decades of the 1900s (Interlachen’s recent remodel by Andrew Green was our 2024 Best Renovation winner, and White Bear completed several years of ongoing renovation by Jim Urbina including restoring the greens and bunkering on holes like nine, 11 and 18). Hazeltine National was built in the early 1960s by Robert Trent Jones. Spring Hill is a 1999 Tom Fazio design, and Windsong Farm opened in 2003 (the club’s second course opened in 2024).
For some of the country's most adventurous public golf, head upstate to the areas around Brainerd and Biwabik, where golfers will find the gorgeously secluded courses at Giant's Ridge, a 100 Greatest Public Course; Wilderness at Fortune Bay; one of Arnold Palmer's best designs, Deacon's Lodge; and the Classic at Madden's Resort. Cragun’s Run on Gull Lake, meanwhile, has just completed several years of remodels that have combined renovated sections of its courses with new holes built by Minnesota native and major championship winner Tom Lehman, creating a new 18 and 27-hole layouts.
Below you'll find our 2025-'26 ranking of the Best Golf Courses in Minnesota.
Scroll on for the complete list of the best courses in Minnesota. Be sure to click through to each individual course page for bonus photography and reviews from our course panelists. We also encourage you to leave your own ratings … so you can make your case for (or against) any course that you've played.
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Wayzata Country Club is one of the best courses in Minnesota. Discover our experts’ reviews and where Wayzata Country Club sits in our rankings.
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Rochester Golf & Country Club is one of the best courses in Minnesota. Discover our experts’ reviews and where Rochester Golf & Country Club sits in our rankings.
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Dacotah Ridge Golf Club in Morton is one of the best courses in Minnesota. Discover our experts’ reviews and where Dacotah Ridge Golf Club sits in our rankings.
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Created by Texas-based architect Jeff Brauer, The Legends course at this 36-hole public complex in upper Minnesota has always played second-fiddle in our rankings to the more highly regarded Quarry Course. Located two-and-a-half miles north of its brother, it’s nevertheless an ideal sibling with holes similarly gouged from a wilderness of forest and crackled ground movement. You can get the sense of being lost in time and forest journeying through the vast areas the course traverses.
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Legends Club in Prior Lake is one of the best courses in Minnesota. Discover our experts’ reviews and where Legends Club sits in our rankings.
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Town & Country Club in St. Paul is one of the best courses in Minnesota. Discover our experts’ reviews and where Town & Country Club sits in our rankings.
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StoneRidge Golf Club in Stillwater is one of the best courses in Minnesota. Discover our experts’ reviews and where StoneRidge Golf Club sits in our rankings.
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Peter Wong
Previous rank: 16
A former member of our 100 Greatest Public list, Deacon’s Lodge is a scenic Arnold Palmer signature course that plays through woodlands and around lakes. The fairways have a lot of movement to them and are often banked on the sides, filtering balls toward the middle. There are some forced carries over native grasses, which add to the aesthetics of this central Minnesota layout.
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Somerby Golf Club in Byron is one of the best courses in Minnesota. Discover our experts’ reviews and where Somerby Golf Club sits in our rankings.
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The design lineage of Minnesota Valley is cloudy, but the club believes the Seth Raynor drafted plans for the course during one of his visits to Minneapolis in the early 1920s (it’s doubtful he was involved in the actual construction of the course). But the design if full of Raynor and C.B. Macdonald ideas, and no matter who gets original credit, Minnesota Valley now fully looks and plays like a Raynor course following a 2018 renovation by Bill Bergin that enhanced the character of holes like Short, Redan, Raynor’s Prize Dogleg and a Biarritz green at a par-4 rather than the usual par-3.
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For most of its history, Golden Valley has been in a state of flux. Tom Bendelow designed the club’s first course before A.W. Tillinghast was hired in the 1920s to construct a new course. A number of his bunkers were removed in the 1930s to reduce maintenance costs (Tillinghast, by this time, was traveling the country on behalf of the PGA of America, advising clubs on ways to cut costs during tight economic times), and others were tinkered with and modified in one way or another. A series of mid-century renovations took the design further from the one Tillinghast put in the ground, but recent work, first by Ron Forse and, in 2023, by Kevin Norby, has gradually restored much of the architect’s ideology. Greens have been expanded to add new hole locations, trees have been thinned and Tillie’s lost bunkers have returned with their shapes redefined. This is a classic parkland expression of golf on a graceful property that demands drives be placed in the fairway and approach shots left below the hole.
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In 1920, Donald Ross was invited to remodel this 1916 Willie Park Jr. design. For some unknown reason, Ross did not include Minneapolis GC in his resume. His work here wasn’t insignificant: Ross moved the clubhouse and reconfigured the routing, making it mostly his own, and the course was deemed strong enough to host the 1959 PGA Championship, won by Bob Rosburg. A recent renovation by Jeff Mingay altered the bunkering and recaptured many original green contours. It is well known in the Twin Cities as the “Player’s Club” because of the number of single-digit handicappers.
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Midland Hills always suspected their course was designed by Seth Raynor in the early 1920s, but they had no records of what that course looked like. They could intuit what some of Raynor's original holes were, but the overall architecture had dulled and shrunk over the years. That changed in 2018 when superintendent Mike Manthey discovered a 1921 irrigation map hidden above the ceiling in his office. The drawing showed Raynor's vision for the course, including individual holes and bunkers, a roadmap that designer Jim Urbina used to recreate and sharpen the old templates like the Biarritz, Road and Eden. The improvements have helped vault the course into the Best in State rankings for the first time.
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Northwood sits on an elevated site with arresting views of Lake Superior. Built in 1921, the steep terrain was baffling to route and challenging to build on in the era before most construction jobs used modern earth-moving equipment. Ross solved the puzzle by layering the holes up and down the slopes like switchback roads, forcing him to do things he ordinarily wouldn’t. The third hole climbs some 100 feet from tee to green, while the 10th plays across the pitched hill. Keeping the tee ball in the fairway is, at best, awkward. The greens do not have much interior contour, but the tilted surfaces require expert surveying skills. In recent years, some judicious tree clearing and a change in maintenance have resulted in firm and fast playing surfaces.
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Architect Ron Prichard took an existing layout by Charles Maddox and completely transformed it—with a brand-new course reopening in 2015 that is one of the best in Minnesota. Tyler Rae has done some renovation work in recent years to clear out a significant number of trees to open up sightlines and tweak green complexes to make some less severe. Still, Olympic Hills features intriguing greensites built in all shapes and sizes, with a good variety of holes.
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The Classic is a genuine amateur architect design, although course superintendent Scott Hoffmann consulted with veteran course architect Geoff Cornish as well as others in creating The Classic at Madden's. It's beautiful but not for the faint of heart, a hilly course with some narrow, pine-lined fairways and occasional challenging shots over water from sidehill or downhill lies. But, like other multiple-course operations, such as Bethpage and Cog Hill, Madden's has easier alternate layouts for high-handicappers.
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Somerset Country Club in Mendota Heights is one of the best courses in Minnesota. Discover our experts’ reviews and where Somerset Country Club sits in our rankings.
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In 2005, The Wilderness at Fortune Bay won America's Best New Upscale Public Course, a year after architect Jeff Brauer won the same award for The Quarry at Giants Ridge, also in northern Minnesota. Where The Quarry uses slopes and ramps, Wilderness rewards aerial play, with some high-low alternate fairways, lake-edged greens and a pair of drop-shot par-3s. As we wrote back in 2005, "its options outnumber its rock outcroppings, and there are outcroppings galore."
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John Fought and Minnesota native Tom Lehman were given 243 acres of rolling pastureland 25 miles west of Minneapolis to build Windsong Farm’s South Course. Opened in 2003, this golfers' club is designed to test the best players with a big ballpark of a course tipping out at 7,380 yards. Originally, the fescue-lined playing corridors were relatively tight. Fought returned and widened the fairways, which opened up different lines to drive and better angles into the greens. The collection areas around the greens allow for varying kinds of recovery shots back to the large, moderately sloping greens. While it is still a challenging golf course, it is very playable and a walker's paradise. The course’s second 18, the North, also designed by Fought, opened in the summer of 2024.
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It doesn't get the press that courses such as Bandon Dunes, Pacific Dunes, Whistling Straits or Arcadia Bluffs, but The Quarry at Giants Ridge plays very links-like with its collection of fairway speed slots, greenside backboards and backstops and reverse-camber greens. It's very inventive design also demands some aerial play, too. A standout is its 13th, a drivable par-4 that's nearly as wide as it is long, with three alternate routes to a 100-yard-wide green. We named it the best 13th hole in America built since 2000.
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Something was in the air in Minneapolis and St. Paul in the 1920s. Call it an esprit de refaire (French for “repair”). Many of the prominent clubs in the market looked at their existing golf courses and thought, “we can do better.” The Twin Cities were an incubator for the first major movement of golf course reformation as courses laid out just years before by designers like Tom Bendelow, William Watson and Willie Park, Jr., were redesigned, most of them by Donald Ross. Interlachen (No. 1), White Bear Yacht Club (No. 4), The Club at Golden Valley (No. 15), Minneapolis G.C. and others. The Minikahda Club also falls into this category. Robert Foulis designed the original nine, and Watson was involved in some capacity, too. Then the club hired Donald Ross to completely revamp the course after Chick Evans dismantled the old design in the 1916 U.S. Open, shooting a then-record 286 using just seven clubs. Many more renovations ensued, but the club has perhaps settled on a lasting version after the work of Kyle Franz, who continued a program of thinning overgrowth, widening fairways and recreating bunker shapes and arrangements reminiscent of the club’s 1920s heyday.
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Before he moved to California, where he laid the foundation of many of that state's best courses from the pre-Depression era, William Watson was a pioneer of golf in Minnesota. He arranged the first nine holes at White Bear Yacht Club in 1912 near the shore of White Bear Lake on some of the most roly-poly land imaginable. Several years later, Watson added another nine holes and proceeded to remodel the entire course. Donald Ross has long been rumored to have done the remodel work, but the club doesn't have evidence of this and is now of the mind that the course is entirely Watson's creation. The site's wildly rumpled, unmodified land is the heart and soul of White Bear Yacht Club. Modern architects would likely have leveled and softened the slopes and ravines, but here they bring the golf to life visually and psychologically, offering nary a level stance and asking the player to drive to high sides of the tilted fairways and hit approaches with extreme control. Over the last two decades, under the guidance of Jim Urbina, the surrounding canopy of forest has been pared back to better reveal the massive, enthralling undulations of the course, and several holes, including the par-3s at six and 11, as well as the 12th and 18th green complex, are currently being restored.
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Stephen Szurlej
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Courtesy of PGA of America, Gary Kellner
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Hazeltine might be the most controversial championship course of the modern era, designed by Robert Trent Jones for former USGA president Totton Heffelfinger, who used his considerable clout to bring the 1966 U.S. Women’s Open and 1970 U.S. Open to the then-very immature layout. Criticisms were so extreme that Trent Jones spent the next two decades remodeling it, straightening doglegs, relocating holes and rebuilding greens. Between 1987 and 2010, his younger son, Rees Jones, assumed the reconstruction, with even greater success—and today the layout, like many in the old man's portfolio, is more Rees than Trent. Hazeltine hosted the 2009 PGA and 2016 Ryder Cup, the latter a bright spot for the American team, which perhaps is why the PGA of America has already awarded the 2028 Ryder Cup to this Minnesota site. Davis Love III, longtime Ryder Cup player and victorious U.S. captain in 2016, will step in for Rees and make modifications to the course in preparation with his brother Mark and their lead architect, Scot Sherman.
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While Tom Fazio is best known for creating massive landscapes for his designs, Spring Hill required little manipulation of earth. Fazio utilized the existing rolling topography to form what is one of his most natural designs. Holes are isolated from one another by thick forests of evergreens and, in one section of the property, acres of maple trees that provide a brilliant color display each fall. With several tight fairways, marshland along some edges, many uphill approach shots into elevated greens and subtle movements in the putting surfaces, Spring Hill is also one of Fazio’s most challenging designs.
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When Bobby Jones won the 1930 U.S. Open at Interlachen (completing the second leg of what would become the game’s first Grand Slam), fellow competitor Gene Sarazen insisted the course was tougher than everything but Oakmont. In the decades that followed a series of architects including Robert Trent Jones, Geoffrey Cornish and Brian Silva worked to keep Interlachen’s edge, but nothing could staunch the march of time that made the course one-dimensional through the shrinkage of greens and the maturation of the hundreds of trees that had been planted, shading fairways and masking the property’s natural land movements. Enter Andrew Green in 2023, who was given the resources to strip back the layers and rebuild the course based on the blueprints Donald Ross developed in 1922 when he remodeled the course. Interlachen’s edginess is back, with ominous, strategically arranged bunkers guarding greens and fairway lines, and the expanded putting surfaces presenting a range of come-and-get-me hole locations that haven’t been seen in ages. The restored bunkering shines a spotlight on Interlachen’s wondrous undulation, punctuating focal points like the shared promontory of the second and seventh greens and the majestic rise toward the fortress putting surface of the par-5 12th.
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