Best golf courses near Seattle, WA

West Seattle Golf Course is considered by many of our panelists to be the best municipal track in Seattle. The front nine is relatively flat and meanders alongside Longfellow Creek, while the back nine is hillier and more difficult. There are beautiful views of downtown Seattle on several holes. The quality muny hosted the 1953 U.S. Amateur Public Links.

Situated in the Beacon Hill neighborhood just south of downtown Seattle, Jefferson Park is a tight, tree-lined municipal that hosted the 1967 U.S. Amateur Public Links. The course plays just 6,200 yards from the tips and offers scenic vistas of the Seattle skyline and Mount Rainier.

Many 100 Greatest courses began as open fields, then had decades of green committees plant trees to frame fairways; many of those same clubs are now clear-cutting such trees to open up vistas and invite more sunlight and air to greens. Sahalee is not such a club. Its course was carved from a Pacific Northwest forest of cedar, spruce, fir and pine, and its dominant theme has always been narrow fairways framed by towering trees that reach to the heavens. To strip Sahalee of its trees would be to shave Samson of his locks, so when Rees Jones and Steve Weisser began a 2022 renovation of the famed North/South nines where the 1998 PGA Championship and 2016 and 2024 KPMG Women’s PGA Championships were held (Jones had previously remodeled the course in 1996), they were calculated in their approach to thinning the forest growth. Gradually, they pared back the treeline to better expose the site’s topography. They were able to expand fairways to enhance shot options and took out individual trees that had come to interfere with strategic angles into greens. What players may notice most are the new bunkers, each rebuilt, reshaped and repositioned to better engage with landing areas and putting surface hole locations. Sahalee seems at once refreshed while being absolutely the same carved-from-the-woods course it’s always been.