Area golfers have reason to celebrate after three courses made Golf Week’s list of the Top 200 resort golf courses in the U.S.
According to Golf Week, their course ratings panel are continuously visiting courses and rating them on a standard ten-point criteria. In addition, each panelist gives the course a single, overall grade. Those grades are aggregated together to get a score, and their place in the top 200 listing.
It doesn’t surprise many that the top courses are on the coasts. The overall best course, Pebble Beach Resorts in Pebble Beach, California, leads other courses in North Carolina and Oregon; Kohler Whistling Straits in Mosel, Wisconsin, made the earliest local course appearance at number 4 overall.
In Minnesota, three courses made the list:
#35 – The Quarry at Giant’s Ridge in Biwabik, MN.
Golf Digest describes the course in Northeast Minnesota this way:
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.
#88 – The Wilderness at Fortune Bay in Tower, MN.
Golf Digest has this to say about the course on the shores of Lake Vermilion:
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, wit 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.
#106 – Madden’s on Gull Lake in Brainerd, MN.
This course gets the following review from Golf Digest:
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.
Here’s to some great golfing in the season ahead. To view the complete list, click here.
2026 Winter Olympians with ties to Minnesota
Gallery Credit: Kelly Cordes/TSM/St CLoud
