The best golf courses in Washington

A must-play public course in Washington for its scenic views and strong conditioning. Towering trees frame most holes and require a golfer to keep their tee shots in play, with little recovery options given off some fairways.

One of the most invigorating architectural feats by the late architect John Harbottle III—who died suddenly in 2012 but left an impressive portfolio with 15 original designs and 45 remodels mostly in the Pacific Northwest and California—is Palouse Ridge, home of the Washington State golf teams. Built on the site of an existing nine-hole course, Harbottle reimagined the layout with some acquired land as part of a $12 million project that opened in 2008. The course offers tee-time packages on Cougar football weekends.

Jordan Spieth won the 2011 U.S. Junior Amateur at Gold Mountain’s Olympic course, just outside Seattle. The Olympic course—one of two 18-hole courses at Gold Mountain—is a hilly layout with tree-lined fairways and greens that fall off into collection areas. The course also hosted the 2006 U.S. Amateur Public Links.

Canterwood Golf & Country Club in Gig Harbor is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Washington State. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information

Tacoma Country & Golf Club is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Washington State. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information

Ridge is the operative word at this 1999 Jack Nicklaus design east of Seattle. The holes run out and back along spines perched over ravines, with fairways and greens bracketed by sleek, modern bunkers. Though bordered by homes, the attention is more focused on elevated views of the nearby Cascade Mountains and dense evergreen forests. Holes 12 through 15 play along the rim of a deep, wooded canyon that falls away tee-to-green on the left, followed by a short gambler's par 4 where players have to navigate a field of staggered bunkers.

Royal Oaks Country Club in Vancouver is our seventh-ranked course in Washington State.

Wine Valley, in southeast Washington State, is one of Pacific Northwest native architect Dan Hixson's first original designs, and he left nothing in the bag (Hixson also designed Bandon Crossings, the courses at Silvies Valley Ranch and Bar Run, all in Oregon). The holes feature enormous fairways draped across an agricultural plain that are punched up with ragged bunkers that force players to either attack head-on or lay back into more cautious positions. With no shelter or trees, the course is vulnerable to the frequently intense winds, so that width is needed to navigate shots into the often wildly contoured greens. With wind, undulation and elastic hole locations, his thrill-a-minute design will never play the same way twice.

Tumble Creek is the private member course at Suncadia Resort on the eastern slope of the Wenatchee Mountains, east of Seattle. The design is a more sublime turn for Tom Doak and his associates at Renaissance Golf. The holes lay quietly over the elevations, refusing to compete for attention with the surrounding topography and evergreen borders. The architecture exudes calmness and confidence without being showy, with elegantly contoured greens and just enough bunkering to demand players work shots into position. The exception is a hole like the bending par-5 fourth that rides up and over a steep shoulder of land, daring players to cut the inside corner around a ravine, as well as the ninth and 18th holes that also tackle sloping terrain. The par 3s are some of the state's best, particularly the second hole that would feel at home at any course in the Heathlands outside London.

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.

The winner of Golf Digest’s Best New Course of 2014 award, Gamble Sands sits atop a sprawling, treeless plateau of sandy desert overlooking Washington’s Columbia River Valley. The extremely playable layout is oversized in every respect, with enormously wide fairways, gigantic greens, no rough and some of the most panoramic vistas around. In using “friendly contours” that divert shots away from bunkers and toward targets, designer David Kidd wants everybody to have fun. He hopes good players will relish opportunities to score low and high handicappers will post their best round ever. With three reachable par 4s on the 18, that’s a possibility. Of course, Gamble Sands was Kidd’s inspiration for his Mammoth Dunes.

Although he owned his own turboprop for over a decade, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that Tom Fazio agreed to work in the Pacific Northwest. Previously, it seemed just too far to travel for someone with six children at home. But former Seattle Supersonics basketball star Jack Sikma convinced Fazio to help his group build a golf-only, non-residential 18 on land east of Seattle. Perhaps it helped that the land had been previously owned by aviation pioneer Bill Boeing, land he had called the Aldarra Farm. Fazio’s design, called The Member’s Club at Aldarra until recent years, quickly became known for its last four holes, dubbed “The Gauntlet.” They consist of a long, stout par 3 (with an old stone farm silo near the green), a par 4 along wetlands, a reachable par 4 with stacked sod bunkers before the green and a long closing par 4 with two forced carries over ravines.

Prodded by his partner, Bruce Charlton, and their then-design associate Jay Blasi, veteran architect Robert Trent Jones Jr. agreed to a radically different, vertical-links style when building Chambers Bay in an abandoned sand quarry near Tacoma. By the time Golf Digest named it as America’s Best New Public Course of 2008, the course had already been awarded the 2010 U.S. Amateur and 2015 U.S. Open. In the Amateur, Chambers Bay proved to be hard, both in the firmness of its dry fescue turf (Jones called his fairways “hardwood floors”) and its difficulties around and on the windswept greens. For the U.S. Open, the firmness and surrounds were more manageable, but the greens were notoriously bumpy. That’s now been remedied, as the fescue turf on the putting surfaces has been replaced with pure Poa Annua. What's irreplaceable are the views of Puget Sound from nearly every hole, multi-level fairways that entice bold driving to gain second-shot advantages and two holes running parallel to a railway that invokes feelings of early Scottish and Irish links courses.