It looks like no terrain you have ever seen before on a golf course — like you’ve been transported into an Ansel Adams landscape portrait.
That’s the grounds of Greywalls at Marquette Golf Club in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with Lake Superior shimmering in the distance.
The aptly named Greywalls was sculpted out of breathtaking, tumbling land featuring granite walls and outcrops scattered throughout the fairways and greens — it feels straight out of the Jurassic era.
It makes for a gnarly one-of-a-kind ride through the wilderness, with stunning views and elevation changes, never-seen-before fairway impediments and numerous holes that would qualify as the signature on most courses.
Greywalls was created by Saginaw native Mike DeVries — who a few years earlier completed the acclaimed private Kingsley Club in Grand Traverse County — after Marquette Golf Club saw its original 1929 course, The Heritage, being overrun.
DeVries, who earned his Masters in landscape architecture in 1994 from Michigan, has created well-regarded courses in west Michigan, including Pierson’s Pilgrim’s Run, Grand Rapids’ The Mines and Hamilton’s Diamond Springs.
Greywalls, opened in 2005, continually ranks inside the top 50 public-access courses in America, as judged by Golfweek: It was No. 40 nationally in 2024, and No. 2 in Michigan.
How DeVries had the vision to carve out Greywalls from a rugged forest is jaw-dropping, both to the architectural expert and the untrained eye.
Right away, you know you’re in for something different.
The par-5 first hole tees from a high point to boldly sloping turf with rock outcroppings on each side.
The par-4 second fairway has severe peaks and valleys as it winds and tumbles to a green site sticking out of the forest.
The par-4 fourth features a giant mound of fairway on the left with a small patch of moss and fescue on top of another jutting rock that drops off to a valley of fairway on the right. The green is protected on the left by a giant overgrown rock wall standing a few stories high.
The sixth might be the best of them all: a rare uphill par-3. But, boy, is it intimidating, hitting over a rock outcropping with a green sitting on a plateau surrounded by more rock. I’m surely one of thousands to bang it off the rock face guarding the right side of the green.
And the par-4 seventh? Don’t even get me started on that extreme roller coaster of a fairway with random jagged rocks splattered across it. Just making it through the hole with the same ball you teed off with — and without a sprained ankle — is an accomplishment.
The par-4 11th makes you feel like you’re on the only golf hole in the world, beautifully framed by bunkers crisscrossing the fairway from every angle with the dense forest behind the green.
Virtually every hole offers something unique, including tightly mown areas around the fast greens, which allow imaginative ways to get the ball rolling toward the cup. It’s a design feature not seen enough at most courses.
The journey ends on the downhill par-5 18th with a tee shot down a chute framed by more rock outcroppings, with Lake Superior beckoning beyond the horizon.
Greywalls has earned even more positive publicity over the past few years from two leaders of new-age golf media platforms. The website Fried Egg Golf spotlighted the course and featured a short video on No. 7 among its “Great Golf Holes” series.
“Mike DeVries created one of the most memorable holes in golf simply by letting the jaw-dropping terrain be the star,” Fried Egg founder Andy Johnson says in the clip.
No Laying Up played its final match of its “Tourist Sauce (Michigan)” series in 2021 showcasing the entire course intertwined with commentary from DeVries.
Greywalls is the type of experience where after you finish the round, you have to take a seat to talk through and digest the nigh-indescribable nature of what you just witnessed.
And though you might need a day to recover, you want to get out and play it again to see what kind of breaks you might get the second time around.
It is a course every golfer from below the Mackinac Bridge should try to play at least once, and more than worth the half-day drive from southeast Michigan.
Marlowe Alter is an assistant sports editor at the Detroit Free Press and a spraying golf aficionado. You can reach him by email: malter@freepress.com.
Follow the Detroit Free Press on Instagram (@detroitfreepress), TikTok (@detroitfreepress), YouTube (@DetroitFreePress), X (@freep), and LinkedIn, and like us on Facebook (@detroitfreepress).
Stay connected and stay informed. Become a Detroit Free Press subscriber.
