One of my favorite things in golf is to find a true hidden gem. Everyone always wants to play the big list courses and those are usually worth the trip, but you go in there with high expectations. Unless they’re really great, you often leave thinking, ‘yeah it was great, but I already knew that it would be.’

But when you come to a course that you know little about, your expectations are modest and could be exceeded by quite a bit. That was the case for me with the Leelenau Club at Bahle Farms. To be fair, my traveling golf buddy—who’s played more Michigan public courses than I have—said that this was his favorite up north. But I’ve never seen it ranked or even mentioned in any golf magazine. So when I was visiting a friend in the Leelenau Peninsula and she suggested that we play golf, I suggested that we come here.

Good choice; not only is Bahle Farms a very good course, it’s easily in my top 20 public courses in the state. The course is nicely routed over hilly (but not mountainous) terrain. The bunkering is well done and the shaping is minimalistic, with greens fitting very well into their surroundings. But, in addition to a few excellent holes, the real standouts here are the green surfaces, which are some of the best in the state. The green contours are broad and wave; not the kind of random, ripply contours that I usually like, but very interesting and challenging. All of it adds up to a beautiful, interesting, and challenging course.



The first tee shot is pleasant enough, downhill to a somewhat saddle-shaped fairway. The green is on a shelf to the right over a deep bunker left, so right-center is the best angle of approach. The par 5 second is the first of several excellent holes. While it could use some tree clearing left of the start of the fairway, there’s plenty of room down there to play to. You can see from the tee that the green angles from front left to back right, so if you’re laying up, you’ll want to do it near the left fairway bunker. There’s also a bunker short right to avoid if you go for the green. But the most notable thing about this hole is the green, which generally slopes back to front, but with several little humps around the edges. There’s also a short grass collection area to the left if you pull your approach. This is one of the best par 5s in the state.

The third is a bit awkward: a dogleg left short par 4 with a reverse camber fairway. You have to be very careful with this tee shot as it’s easy to lose a ball if you get too aggressive. The second shot is uphill to a heavily contoured green in a bowl. A very tricky hole, especially for first time players, but the visuals are good enough so that it doesn’t seem gimmicky.

The par 3 fourth is very tough but for my liking, one of the better looking pond holes that I’ve seen. It’s all carry to the green, but the green is very attractive, sitting in a saddle at the base of a forested hill. The dogleg left par 5 fifth is also a bit awkward, but the visuals here are worse than the third. Anywhere in the fairway is fine, but the hole can play quite long if you keep it to the right. The second is a lay-up short of the ravine in front of the green, which is framed by cherry trees.

The par 3 sixth is sort-of a redan green, higher on the right than on the left and with contours that allow you to feed the ball to back left hole locations. The seventh is an excellent, medium-length, uphill par 4. The tee shot is pretty wide open but it’s clear that the hole narrows as you approach the green, so this limits how much you can spray it. Plus, the green clearly angles from front left to back right, so a shot up the left side is preferred. The approach is very difficult—it plays at least one club uphill and the green is convex, sloping off in the front, right, and back. A miss short is alright and a close miss right will get hung up in green side rough. But as with several other holes, the real star here is the green, which is very wavy and has a big ridge running across the middle from left to right. The ridge broadens to become a fairly large back right tier (where our pin was). This green exemplifies the greens at Bahle Farms, which are often very undulating, but always give you a decent amount of room to play to around pin positions and safe misses around the greens.

You can also see the green on the downhill par 4 eighth and once again, it’s clear from the front-left to back-right orientation of the green that you’ll want to play up the left side. After a bit of a cart ride uphill through the woods, we come to the par 3 ninth, with a green shelved into a hillside. This isn’t my favorite hole as it feels like it belongs on one of the many poorly routed northern Michigan with poorly chosen, severe green sites. But it’s the only green on the course like this, so it’s forgivable.

Running parallel to the first on its left, the tenth is a pretty wide open and straight forward hole. The eleventh is a northern Michigan special…the drop shot par 3. I actually like this one a lot because there’s plenty of room to miss short. That’s important because when you’re going 75 feet downhill, it’s difficult to judge how far the ball will fly.

After an uphill right doglegging par 5, we have a bit of a change of setting: a long par 4 through a cherry orchard. This fairly flat hole is nevertheless interesting because the right fairway bunkers guard the best line to the green, which has a single bunker on its left. The long par 4 fourteenth is also very interesting. The tee shot could use a bit of tree trimming, especially on the hill on the left. But there’s plenty of room out there and a good tee shot sets up a very elegant looking second shot over a ravine and two bunkers. The shot also plays very well because there is ample short grass short and left and the contours slope toward the green, allowing you to run the ball onto this small green.

The par 3 fifteenth shouldn’t be too hard—there’s plenty of room up there. But if you miss short, the fall will come back a good 10 yards. The par 5 sixteenth doglegs right around a hill. You’ll want to hit a good tee shot here so that you can be sure that you can get your second up the hill and through the saddle. There are no bunkers for the last 2/3 of the hole and it doesn’t need them; the hole falls beautifully across the land and the pinching of the lay-up area with trees right and left creates demand for accuracy. And again, the green sits very simply on the land.

The short par 4 seventeenth has a bit of an awkward uphill drive into another saddle-shaped fairway. But the hole balances with awkwardness with another very simple green site, which is one of my favorite in the state. It doesn't look like they moved any dirt to build this green. Bahle Farms is on a great piece of land but the course shows that if you do a careful job of routing the holes, you can have beautiful, simple green sites where you don’t have to move a lot of earth, saving a lot of money and creating something in harmony with, rather than fighting its surroundings.

The par 4 last features a very challenging approach up a hill to another heavily contoured green. It’s a fitting conclusion that captures the course well—very pretty, challenging without being too difficult, and with an excellent set of greens.

While Bahle Farms may not be as strategic as, say the South Course at Arcadia Bluffs, the greens are as interesting as just about any Michigan public course and the choice of green sites and shaping around the greens show that the designer (and I don’t know who that was) really knew what he was doing. This course is probably the closest thing to Tom Doak’s sadly defunct High Pointe in Traverse City. It exemplifies his style of design nicely, with minimal shaping around the greens and fairways and emphasis on the contour of the green surfaces.

All in all, Bahle Farms is as good as anything in northern Michigan, save for maybe the top tier place like Arcadia Bluffs and Forest Dunes. Given that it’s cheaper than almost all of them, it’s definitely worth a play if you’re near Traverse City.

On my summer of 2020 supposed-to-be-quarantining-but-fuck-it-let’s-go-on-another-golf-trip golf trip up to Greywalls to play with the only people who are true enough of believers to try and walk Greywalls, my traveling golf buddy Bob and I decided that we needed to check some boxes off at Boyne Highlands. I had played the Heather but not the Ross or the Hills, he had played the Ross but not the Hills or the Heather. Because I couldn’t get us on Belvedere in the window of time that we had, I scheduled rounds for us at these three Boyne Highlands courses.

I have to admit, it’s difficult for me to get too excited about an Arthur Hills course. Although there are some that I like (like Shepherd’s Hollow, which I think is the best public course in southeastern Michigan), I don’t think that I’ve played one that didn’t have some poor routing choices, bad shaping, and/or stupid holes. But I try to keep an open mind and I’d heard that the Boyne Highlands course was one of his best. Looking at the course on Google Maps wasn’t reassuring—it looked like the holes were scattered across the whole greater Harbor Springs area. But it certainly wouldn’t be the first unwalkable course in northern Michigan and several of them are still quite good.



The course gets off to an excellent start. In fact after about four holes, I thought that I might be playing the first excellent Arthur Hills course out of the few dozen that I’ve seen. The first hole is reminiscent of the first hole at the—alas, much better—Forest Dunes. It’s a medium length par 4 with a wide fairway that gently doglegs right to a green that opens up from the left. It’s a good template for an opening hole.

The second hole is a very nice short par 4 where you can go at the green over a waste bunker to the left or play a safer shot that results in a poorer angle out to the right. The carry isn’t too demanding but when you get to the green, you’ll realize the importance of leaving yourself your preferred yardage—the green is small and slopes away to the back.

Three is a very interesting par 5. The tee shot plays diagonally (left-to-right) over a waste bunker and the green is probably reachable if you hit a long drive that skirts it. The next shot is one of the more interesting lay-ups that I can think of on a par 5. You can play short of a complex of bunkers to the right that is clearly well short of the green or you can carry another bunker on the left to a tighter stretch of fairway on the left that runs to the green. That’s enough to make it interesting but once you see the green, you’ll realize that there’s an additional trade-off. The green is deep and skinny and the angle opens up to the right side of the fairway. But if you lay-up here—which is the easier task—the approach is also blind over the bunkers. The lay-up left results in a clear look at the green, but with a worse angle. The sweet spot is right in the middle; if you go between the right edge of the left fairway bunker and the left edge of the further right one, you'll have a good angle and a partial view of the green. This is one of the better par 5s in  Michigan.

The fourth is a medium length par 4 that doglegs gradually left around a pond but the fifth, a long par 4 cut through an old red pine plantation is. Not for the tee shot, which is pretty wide open, but for the green complex—a rarity for Arthur Hills. It’s a good thing that it’s wide open off the green because the green is hard to hit. It’s slightly elevated and there’s a bunker to the left, but the most interesting thing is the collection area that runs from the front right of the green around the back. While there’s a safe miss to the front that allows for an easy bump-and-run, anything missed right or long leaves a very difficult shot of at least 50 feet up about a 5 foot hill. The edges of the green are concave so as long as you get it to the putting surface, it won’t come back to your feet. But like Pinehurst #2, which is always my reference point for collection areas around greens, this hole leaves you a safe place to miss but leaves you a very awkward shot if you get too aggressive.

Although the distances between them are unnecessarily long, the next two holes, a par 5 and a par 3, are very pleasant. Through the first seven holes, the terrain and holes here reminded me a lot of Tullymore just north of Grand Rapids, but far less awkward and really, quite good. But the course starts to get more difficult with the dogleg right par 4 eighth. There’s a huge waste bunker the runs down the left for most of the length of the fairway to the green but because it’s the lowest point in the area, it had become a pond, making the approach to the green unintentionally difficult (you can still see the shaping of the bunkers to the left, but they’re completely flooded).

The unnecessary difficulty continues at the ninth, a medium length par 3 to a green that’s about 25 feet wide, sloping down a hill into moguls on the left and into a wetlands on the right. It’s even tougher from the back tees, which are at about 215 yards and shift the angle to the right so that the green is shallow.

The next few holes have quite a few severe features, including more greens built up too high above their surroundings. This is an issue at the tenth, which is fairly open off the tee but whose green is elevated about 10 feet above its surroundings on a plateau of short grass. There should be enough width, but it makes for a very intimidating shot and a miss wide right or left creates an opportunity for a back-and-forth X.

The eleventh is a very difficult, but interesting par 5. Though the fairway is wide, you need to hit a solid drive that skirts the bunker on the left because if you don’t, it will be difficult to clear the fairway bunker carved into the hill on your second, about 110 yards short of the green. The hole gets quite narrow as you approach the green, which is built up above woods on both sides, but at least the slope up to the green from the chipping area on the right is a bit more gradual and the plateau isn’t as high as on the previous hole.

Twelve is a medium length par 4 fitting the theme of the recent holes: wide-open fairway, uphill approach to a narrow green. After about a 250 yard uphill cart ride through the woods, we get to the par 5 thirteenth, which is featured in all of the course’s promotional material. It’s probably 100 feet downhill from the tee to the fairway, then probably another 50 or 60 down to the green. Marketing value aside, it’s a good hole because the fairway is wide enough, but you can still get in trouble if you try to shorten the hole by going down the left side. Off a good drive, you’ll have a good chance to go for the green in two and while there isn’t a good way to run the ball up onto it, you might be able to fly it there.

The fourteenth is a beautiful medium length par 3 to a green nicely sited on a ridge. But the drop off to the right is too severe—if you miss here, the ball will run down a 20 foot hill, 20 yards away from the green. The medium long par 4 fifteenth is very good, doglegging right around a long fairway bunker that you’ll either want to skirt or carry. The more of it you can carry to the right, the shorter approach you’ll have and with a better angle. If you pull your tee shot, you’ll be blocked by a tree just left of the fairway and have to play around the bunker at the front left of the green.

While they’ve been too severe occasionally, most of the holes to this point have been very good. Unfortunately, that isn’t true of any of the final three holes. The par 3 sixteenth plays up the other side of the waste bunker-cum-pond from the eighth hole. It’s all sand near this green, but it’s unimaginative and the shaping around the green is overdone and ugly—more 80s/90s Arthur Hills than the 00s Arthur Hills of the rest of the course.

The seventeenth is a split fairway par 4 that makes no sense. A bit like the tenth at Forest Dunes, it’s almost like the two fairways are two separate holes—especially because this one has a separate set of tees for each fairway! I don’t understand what they were trying to do here because it doesn’t seem like the approach to the green is very different from either side. If they let the right side fairway go fallow and become a nice meadow, it wouldn’t be a great hole, but at least it wouldn’t be so inexplicable.

The last hole is a very difficult par 5 which ends on a bit of a cliche—a second shot where you can go for the green over a pond left or lay-up out to the right, where the closer you hug the pond, the shorter a third shot you’ll have. The lay-up here is visually confusing because of several bunkers around the landing area and the large reeds growing a long the pond.

Despite the poor finishing holes and some green complexes being a bit too severe, I liked the Hills course at Boyne Highlands. In fact, it’s almost the best Hills course that I’ve played in Michigan—although I think I’d have 1-18 at Shepherd’s Hollow slightly ahead because it’s more walkable and its worst holes are only borderline rather than outright stupid (The Links nine at Bay Harbor is better than both, but I haven’t played the Quarry nine). The opening holes are mostly very good and contain a lot of interesting strategy and shaping. I think that they could have toned down several of the remaining holes, but the bigger problem is the poor finish--fix the last two holes and now you have a course without serious weaknesses. Except, of course, for the routing, which they could have made more cohesive, with fewer long drives between greens and tees. But as is typical for northern Michigan, everyone is going to ride a cart anyway, so there isn’t a much reason to bother (although the Heather next door is walkable…).

The Ross Memorial Course at Boyne Highlands is attempt to replicate 18 of the best/most famous holes that Donald Ross either designed himself or in the case of the replica of the fourteenth hole at Royal Dornoch, heavily influenced him. While I like the idea of using template and even replica holes, I don’t really like the idea of a course having 18 of them because (1) it’ll be difficult to find the right land for each and fit them together into a cohesive routing and (2) the bunker and green styles from the replicated holes will be different and the replica course will suffer from style inconsistencies between the holes. Both of these are an issue on the Boyne Highlands Ross Memorial Course.

Having said that, it’s a very good golf course if you don’t mind taking a golf cart. Individually, the holes are all good to very good—although it’d be a bit odd if they weren’t since they’re replicating great holes. But while I haven’t seen the originals of most of the holes, they did a reasonably good job of replicating the ones with which I am familiar. They also seem to have done a good job of finding roughly the right land on which to site these holes—which must have been very difficult to do out in the deep, northern Michigan forest. That they did a good job with this probably contributes to the lack of walkability, but there was probably no way around this given that they wanted to build of a course of replica holes.



After a 5 minute cart ride from the clubhouse (which seems to be a signature for Boyne courses), we come to the medium length par 4 first, which is a replica of the sixth at Seminole, minus the palm trees and the billionaires (well, maybe one or two come here). The hole has 11 huge bunkers, although they don’t feel too imposing off the tee. The approach is a different matter; the green is very narrow and is angled to receive a shot from the left side of the fairway. It rises to the middle, then falls away to the back. It’s a very interesting green.

The second is a short par 4 replica of the fourth at Plainfield. The hole bends to the left and has a slight reverse camber fairway. An approach from the left is shorter and with a better angle. The third is a replica of the long par 3 seventeenth on Oakland Hills South, with which I am familiar. They found a good site for this hole and did a good job with the bunkering, which just completely smothers the green (like the original). Although it’s been awhile, I remember the Oakland Hills green being slightly bigger and with a more severe spine from the back middle toward the front of the green.

Four is a medium long par 4 replica of the fourteenth at Pinehurst #2. Again, I’m familiar with the original hole and they did a pretty good job with the details. The drive is similarly downhill although this version continues slightly downhill to the green while the original approach is flat. The bunker placement is similar but they didn’t do a good job with the short grass collection areas around the green—which is also an issue on the other two Pinehurst replica holes.

Five is an uphill, very long par 5 that replicates the thirteenth at Oak Hill East. If it’s anything like the original, they shouldn’t have tried replicating that hole because this one is just an endless uphill slog with an awkward creek abruptly ending the fairway in the driving zone. The sixth is a medium long par 4 replica of the second at Scioto and is very nice. While there’s room to the left, the right fairway bunkers seem to be magnetic (probably because the tee aligns you slightly in that direction—I hate when holes do that).

The short, uphill par 4 seventh replicates the finisher at Inverness and is also quite good. From 240 out, there are bunkers down both sides of the saddle shaped fairway. It’s not really drivable for anyone who drinks only the right kind of juice, so it’s best to lay back short of that and have a short iron. The eighth is a pretty medium long par 3 over a pond to a large green, a replica of the eleventh at Charlotte Country Club.

After a bit of a cart ride back to the ninth tee, we come across a replica of the par 5 eleventh at Bob O’Link which has one feature that I’m pretty sure isn’t on the original—the cart path running through the middle of the tee boxes out to the fairway. I’m not sure why they did this, but it at least makes it easy to start the hole if the party in your golf cart got going a little bit too heavy too early.

The long par 4 tenth is a replica of a hole that Ross didn’t design, the fourteenth at Royal Dornoch. Ross was from Dornoch and it’s a famous course, so it stands to reason that it was a major inspiration of his. The last two holes have given us a bit of a different landscape treatments, coming out into a meadow and in this case, the hole is lined on both sides with mounds covered with long grass. Royal Dornoch is a links course, so I’m sure there are mounds down both sides covered in long grass, but I would imagine that they also come into the fairways—which is something that the architects of American faux links courses always forget to do. Also here, the plateau green is surrounded by rough rather than short grass, which is un-links-like because it disfavors running the ball onto the green.

Back into the woods for eleven, a replica of the short par 4 thirteenth at Salem Country Club in Massachusetts. Although I haven’t seen the original, this one is an very good, falling beautifully over the rolling contours with an excellent green site fronted by 3 bunkers. The twelfth is a nice downhill par 3 fronted by a big bunker, a replica of the third on the North Course at Detroit Golf Club.

After another long cart ride (back into the meadow), we come to the thirteenth, a replica of the par 5 fifteenth at Seminole. This hole has a double fairway split by bunkers and a few pines (the northern Michigan replica of palm trees). The right hand fairway, which makes it reachable also has a pond down the right, providing a good degree of risk for the reward. Split fairway holes often aren’t very good (look no further than the seventeenth at the neighboring Hills course) but this one does a good job of creating options that make sense and balance risk and reward.

Yet another long cart ride takes us back into the woods for a replica of the par 4 second at Pinehurst #2. It’s pretty good but the angle of the tee is slightly off—the original is a slight dogleg right while this one is straight—and the misses here right and long aren’t nearly as severe, due to a tamer green and lack of short grass around it. The second hole on #2 is one of its most difficult because the only good miss is short left. Here, you can recover from most places.

Fifteen is a medium length uphill par 4 that replicates a hole from Aronimink. If this version is any indication, I don’t need to see the original. Then we come to sixteen, a replica of the long par 5 tenth at Pinehurst #2. That is one of the most difficult par 5s that I’ve ever played, but this one is easier. The first two shots do a decent job of replicating the original, except that the waste area/bunkers come in a bit more on the right on the drive and a bit more on the left on the second shot. The original features one of the hardest lay-ups that I’ve ever seen because there isn’t a lot of room between the left bunker and the waste area on the right and you have to hit a good driver to clear it and get with 125 yards. The green here is much smaller and is a real miss as far as the replication. They seem to have only tried to replicate the middle of the green, forgetting to build the back left and right wings that are so difficult to approach unless you’re in just the right part of the fairway (not to mention the very difficult collection area long).

Seventeen replicates the par 3 eighth from Wannamoisett. It’s got four green side bunkers and an interesting spine coming in from the front left. I guess because we’re in Michigan, we have to end on the willow/pond par 4 sixteenth from Oakland Hills. This is a very good replication of the older version, before Rees Jones came in and wrapped the pond around the back of the green to make it look like TPC Sawgrass North. They’re restoring Ross to Oakland Hills now but we’ll still have this memorial to the late 80s version—before the course got the golf course architecture equivalent of plastic surgery in the Dominican Republic (but much more expensive) and had to go on its version of Botched (starring Gil Hanse) to make it look how it looked in the beginning (before those in charge decided that they could do better).

While I wouldn’t encourage building replica courses, this one, stylistic incongruities and long walks aside, is well done. I’m sure that designing this course was a very difficult process. They probably had to go through an iterative process of picking Ross holes that they liked, figuring out where on their land they could put them, trying to make a routing out of that, tossing out holes that wouldn’t fit, picking new ones, trying the routing again, etc. It’d have been nice if they could have made a more cohesive, walkable routing, but that probably would have required a lot more earth moving or considering an even greater variety of holes to replicate. It’s hard to judge how possible that would have been.

So in the end, it’s best to just judge what’s here on its own merits. And I’d say that they’ve certainly got got one of the best courses at Boyne (on the same level as the Hills next door and at least that of the Heather), one which provides something different from the others. I’d also say that even though time and the rankings have passed it by (it won Golf Digest’s Best New Resort course in 1990), it’s still one of the better public courses in northern Michigan and—at least before I’ve seen the last few of the contenders—sneaks into my top 20 public courses in the state.

The Heather was the first course at Boyne Highlands and was designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., right at the height of his career in 1966. Not surprisingly, it exemplifies the most well-known characteristics of his work (for better or worse). Most holes are playable, but it’s pretty hard to make a par—so hard par, easy bogey. I’d played the Heather once before my summer 2020 visit, in early May about 10 years before in cold, wet spring weather. So I wasn’t too impressed by the course. But then a year or two after that, it started showing up in Golf Digest’s top 25 courses in the state…and then showed up a few times on their top 100 public courses! I was baffled by this, as I thought that time and taste had since long passed it by. But when I was headed up to Greywalls with my travel golf buddy Bob—who hadn’t played it before and wanted to check a box (his goal seems to be to play ever course in Michigan, no matter how terrible)—it gave me an opportunity to see if my original assessment of the course had been off.

I’m pleased to say that it was off by a bit—this is a better course than I had remembered. But more notably, it’s a much more difficult course than I had remembered. And I think that that’s part of the reason that I liked it more; I’ve become a better golfer in the last 10 years and this is the type of course that a good player is going to like. Like I said, it exemplifies Trent Jones Sr.’s work; most of the holes are a ‘hard par, easy bogey.’ If you’re a good player who hits the ball fairly straight and can put an iron into the air, it’s a very good test of golf. But as Bob can attest, it’s very hard for the higher handicap. There are ponds in front of several of the greens and bunkers in front of the ones that don’t have ponds. It’s too hard for the average resort golfer, but everything is front of you and there’s usually room to avoid the trouble—with a few notable exceptions.



The first three holes are fairly similar; medium length par 4s that dogleg right, with the primary driving hazard on the right. They’re also all essentially without fairway bunkers as the one fairway bunker, left of one, has become mostly obscured by tree growth. Each also has a few green side bunkers and a green that angles slightly from front-left to back-right. Nothing too special but hey, this is Trent Jones Sr. in the peak of his career when everyone who hired him probably just told him to keep doing what he was doing.

Speaking of similarity, the medium long par 3 fourth is the first of three similar par 3s, all full carries over ponds. This one has a large and undulating green so after three only moderately hard holes, this one gives you a real taste of what’s to come.

The par 5 fifth is one of the hardest par 5s in the state of Michigan. The fairway is wide enough, but there are wetlands left and forest (plus cart path) right. You really need to drive the ball as far as you can and up the left side to avoid having to play this hole very defensively because a pond starts about 250 yards out from the green on the left side and the hole doglegs continuously left around it. If you want to lay-up within 100 yards of the green, you have to carry the pond to get there. This is a very intimidating shot because it looks like if you hit it too far or push it on this line, it’ll run into wetlands through the fairway. They may or may not be true; I just hit a pitching wedge out to the right and then another onto the green. If you’re a good player, it’s always important to remember that even if you play very conservatively to a tough par 5 with your lay-up, the next one won’t be too long (unless you screwed up your drive…).

After another all carry par 3 over a pond, we have another medium length par 4, this time a dogleg left. The green is on about a 45 degree angle front left to back right so here, it’s important to hug the inside of the dogleg—moreso than on the first few holes because the green is quite shallow from the right. The eighth is also a dogleg left, but it’s a long par 4 with fairway bunkers right. The premium here is more on distance rather than being in one side of the fairway or the other because the green is open in front, with the bunkers to the sides.

The ninth is another difficult dogleg left par 5 with a pond on the left. Unless you hit a very good drive, this pond makes the lay-up very tough because you’ll have to thread it between the pond and trees on the right. If you hit a good drive, you can easily carry the pond to a generous lay-up area for the last 125 yards of the hole. The green is elevated with three bunkers in front.

The back nine is very difficult, but results in fewer lost balls as it replaces ponds with bunkers. The medium long gently right doglegging par 4 tenth has five bunkers just short and around the green. You’ll need to drive up the left side to have a good angle in. The short par 5 eleventh has two staggered fairway bunkers but unless you’re name is Bryson DeChambeau or maybe Rory McIlroy, you won’t be able to reach the one on the left so you just need to avoid the one on the right. If you’re laying up, there’s not much to think about. But as we’ll see, the green is typical for this nine, completely surrounded by four huge bunkers.

After the least interesting of the three pond par 3s, we come to two very difficult medium long par 4s. The thirteenth doglegs left and has no fairway bunkers, but the green is elevated and completely surrounded by four large bunkers. The fourteenth green is also elevated and again, completely surrounded by four large fairway bunkers. The difference here is that this drive is straight, but there’s a big fairway bunker on the right and a ridge bisecting the fairway, meaning that you’ll have to hit a good drive just to get a view of the green that you probably won’t hit (maybe a blind shot in is just as well…).

Like the eleventh, the fifteenth is a fairly short par 5 and will be reachable off a good drive. It’s better to be in the left side of the fairway of this slight dogleg left because this time, Trent Jones left a generous 20 foot wide opening between the two front green side bunkers on the left side. The sixteenth is the first par 3 that isn’t over a pond and is a very nice hole, perched into a left-to-right slope with a big green side bunker short right and two left, setting up nicely for a fade.

The seventeenth concludes the most merciful three hole stretch since the first three. It’s a nice medium short length par 4, doglegging right up a hill. Hopefully you’ve played them well and built up a reserve of good humor, which you’ll need for the eighteenth. This is one of the most ridiculous holes in the state—a long par 4 where the fairway runs out about 170 yards short of the green, leaving about 160 yards of pure carry over a pond. But don’t worry, Trent Jones left a 12 yard wide strip of fairway along the pond to the left…and your ball runs down a hill into the pump house if you miss it left (apparently the owner wanted it to be all carry and Trent Jones had to convince him to let him leave even this narrow strip). Unless you manage to drive your ball into the little corner between the pond and the beginning of lay-up strip, you may end up throwing as many clubs into the pond as you hit balls (I wonder which water hazard in the state of Michigan gets the most clubs per player?).

I can’t imagine how difficult this course must have been in the late 60s with the equipment that they’ve had. Maybe it didn’t play as long as its current 7,150 from the back tees (I sure hope not), but unless you were a really long hitter, most of the greens would have required very high, soft shots to hold. They still do and unless you’re a really long hitter, it’s going to be a major struggle. I’m a kind-of short-hitting 2 handicap and it was a real bitch from the mixed back tees (maybe 6,800). A lot of these resort courses are listing mixed back tees on the scorecard, where you move up on most of the toughest holes (I like this and make them up for myself on courses that don't have them). Unless you’re better than a scratch, that’s as far back as you should go here.

Despite the difficulty, I liked the Heather. Other than the last hole, it’s an honest challenge. And, unlike every other Boyne course that I’ve played, it’s a good walk. The green-to-tee distances are all short and the terrain is very modest for a course in this part of the state. It'd be a fantastic tournament course, I think even for the PGA Tour (I think it's harder than Innisbrook's Copperhead course, which is always one of the harder ones on tour).

So even though it’s nowhere near being a great course and doesn’t really have any business being on a list of the top 25 courses in the state or certainly the top 100 public courses in the country, it’s worth playing if you’re in the area—provided that you bring your 3 handicap friends and not your 25 handicap ones. Unless they’re a scratch with a ball retriever.

While par 3 courses and short courses have become all the rage in recent years at big golf resorts, before then, they were mostly downscale, standalone courses with minimal maintenance budgets, intended for beginner golfers. These types of courses served an important role, especially when the game was growing. But no one really thought of par 3 courses and short courses as courses which could be really interesting and worth playing in their own right. And golf resorts certainly weren’t thinking about what type of short course they could add.

All of this may have changed recently but back in the 90s, there was one golf resort that built a 9 hole par 3 course that was not only not meant to be lesser than the main courses, but one that many people saw as a highlight of the resort: Treetops. The course was Threetops, a 9 hole par 3 course designed by then-pro and now part-owner Rick Smith, which opened in 1992 alongside the Fazio Course. Unlike the new par 3 courses (in addition to having a standard number of holes…9, as opposed to 10 or 12 or 17), the par 3s on this course are all of conventional lengths, ranging from just over 100 yards to about 220 yards. Overall, the holes are still on the short side—some kind of wedge will be enough on most of them. But they’re long enough that they can’t be played with some alternative method, like a bump and run, putt, or throwing the ball on the green, unlike some of the newer short courses.

The other, not so positive thing about Threetops that distinguishes it from the new short courses is that it’s not walkable. This isn’t great for a 9 hole par 3 course, but this was never intended to be a place where you go out in the evening in your bare feet with your friends and carry 3X as much weight around in beer as you do in golf clubs (like at the Sandbox at Sand Valley). They took full advantage of the dramatic, almost mountainous property and created something that, like most of the other Treetops courses, feels like an adventure. But it’s easier to carry all that beer in a golf cart any way, so load it up and drive over to the first tee.\


The first hole is one of the easier holes on the course, about 140 yards, but to a much larger green than most. The green is receptive but not too steep and there’s plenty of width—which won’t be the case for many of the rest of the holes.

Like the first hole but unlike most of the rest, the second is pretty flat but features two greens: a smaller one to the left on a ridge to the left where missing left or long is a lost ball and a larger one to the right that slopes heavy from right to left. I didn’t get a shot from the tee, but we can see the pitch in this photo from behind the green.

While the 120 foot downhill par 3 sixth on the Jones Course gets most of the attention at Treetops, the third on Threetops is…150 feet downhill. It’s also longer, about 220 from the back tees. I had no idea what club to hit, so I guessed 7-iron—which was probably the right club, but a slight push sent the ball sailing off toward the woods on the right. It’s really hard to judge such an extremely downhill shot and I think that this applies as much to accuracy as distance.

After a downhill flick with a wedge over a bunch of bunkers, we come to the fifth, which cranks up the difficulty. Three of the first four holes are pretty short and with receptive greens, but five is not only difficult for this course, it would be a difficult par 3 on any course…about 165 yards uphill to a deep but narrow green. You’ll want to stay below the hole here, but accuracy is by far the most important thing.

After a drive to the sixth tee that’s longer than any of the holes, we face another tough mid-iron shot. This time, the green is fairly shallow but wide. It’s receptive but distance control is important because you don’t want to be in the back bunkers.

The par 3 seventh is a very short (~100 yards, but about 70 feet downhill) hole where Lee Travino won $1 million for a hole-in-one in the 2001 shootout that he used to play here with Phil Mickelson, Lee Janzen, and some of Rick Smith’s other students and friends from 1999-2006. While I’ve said that this isn’t a pitch-and-putt course, this is the one hole where you probably could throw the ball on the green…and you’d probably have a better chance of making a hole-in-one that way.

The eighth is another downhill wedge to a fairly small green surrounded by bunkers. That brings us to the last hole, which is similar to the first but is a bit more intimidating because it’s uphill and you can’t see the surface of the green. They had been blasting the bad weather siren since were were on the eighth tee, but we’re not going to sit in the clubhouse for two hours just to have to play 9 minutes worth of par 3s, so we quickly hit, lost our balls (well, one of us), and called it a morning.

So that’s Threetops, the predecessor to the current trend of short courses at golf resorts. While they’re clearly going for a different concept than a place like the Sandbox at Sand Valley—you don’t want to play this one barefoot and too much drinking may result in you losing more than a few golf balls—Threetops is a lot of fun and is an integral part of one of Michigan’s best golf resorts. Even though they haven’t played it in almost 15 years, they got good publicity for the Threetops Shootout and it seems that everyone is still pretty excited to play this course—they were lined up on the first tee when we headed out later in the afternoon to play the first Smith big course right next door.

The Jones course (or as they call it, the ‘Robert Trent Jones Masterpiece’) at Treetops was its first and may be the type species for northern Michigan deep forest adventure golf. Although it wasn’t the first of its type (I think that award goes to the Legend at Shanty Creek), it’s exemplary of the type, taking you on a long ride up and down severe hills through thick woods, with some of the steepest drop shots in the state. It also has small greens and sometimes narrow fairway perched on the edge of wooded oblivion, making it perhaps the most difficult of a type of course that already tends to be quite difficult.

I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the Jones course, perhaps because I played well on my first visit in the early 2000s (although definitely not on my second about 10 years later). But I think I'm pretty good about not letting how I played affect my judgment of a course and that aside, the Jones course is lot of fun to play and it's stunning. I’m not quite sure why, but it feels more adventurous than its counterparts here and at the other big northern Michigan deep forest resort courses. It feels like you’re driving around the whole greater Gaylord area out there and like its younger sister the Smith Signature, there’s a nice variety of landscapes and good transitions between them. I think I like it because it feels like more of an adventure than almost any other course that I can think of, even if that isn't always so good for the quality of the golf. But people will  (and do) like it.

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The difficulty starts with the medium length par 5 first. It requires a solid drive to carry a big ravine and unless you hit a long drive well out between the fairway bunkers, you’ll have a blind, downhill shot to a lay-up area that slopes toward a pond in front of the green. If you’re laying up, you should lay well back to avoid rolling into the pond. If you’re going for it, you need to be very accurate because both the run-up and the green itself are very narrow. Tom Doak hates this hole, but I think it’s fine as long as you hit a half decent tee shot and don’t get too aggressive with your second.

After crossing the entrance drive, we have a medium long uphill par 3 to a green with bunkers…seemingly everywhere. Add in the ravine and it’s a very intimidating shot, the first of many. While I didn’t get a picture, the back tee on the mid-length par 4 third is one of the wildest I’ve seen; about a 230 yard carry through a chute of trees across a wooded ravine. The rest of the tees, to the left of the ravine, leave a visually simple tee shot, but now a good drive can run through the fairway to the left over the cart path into another (blind) ravine. You must err short on the approach to the deep, skinny plateau green because anything missing to the sides or long is likely lost.

The over-difficulty continues on the long par 3 fourth. The built a new, receptive green in a grove of trees to the right about 15 years ago but as of the summer of 2020, they had abandoned it in favor of the original green up the hill 200 yards to the left, almost completely fronted by two bunkers.

The par 5 fifth is my choice for the worst hole on the course and is simply one of the worst holes that I’ve ever played. The landing area for the fairway is a bit too narrow and the trees on either side are an almost guaranteed lost ball. If hit your ball straight down the right side with some distance, it will likely bound forward into the woods. The second shot is even worse. There’s a huge ravine on the left and the fairway snakes along about a 12 yard wide ridge, also sloping off on the right…over a cart path into the woods. Unless you can reach the green, where it opens up again, the only sensible play is to lay back to about 150 yards. One of my playing partners hit what he thought was a good lay-up shot toward the tallest tree in the second picture. I didn’t see him again until about 10 minutes later when we teed off on the sixth.

The sixth is the most famous hole at Treetops and apparently, the namesake for the resort. That’s appropriate if true because you’re shooting out of the treetops, 120 feet downhill to the green. It’s a difficult shot to judge because none of us is used to hitting such a downhill shot. I think I took two clubs less on a calm day but if the wind were blowing, you’d probably take fewer shots if you just putted it down the winding cart path.

The seventh is a medium length par 4 with an approach that’s more uphill than it seems. That brings us to the sharp dogleg right par 4 eighth, a solid contender for the second-worst hole on the course. The tee shot is actually quite good; you can play safe into the slope to the left, but you can dramatically shorten the approach by skirting the trees on the right and cutting the dogleg. That’s especially important here because the green is on a peninsula into a pond and while probably 40 yards deep, is about 17 feet wide. Plus there’s a bunker front right and a small one front left. I just don’t really get it. I don’t know why you’d build such a narrow green surrounded by water with a bunker short making it also difficult to play safe (one of my playing partners attempted to lay-up, only to have his ball bound forward over the edge of the bunker onto the green. Maybe that’s the way to play it.).

The next two holes are quite a hike uphill but I actually like both of them. You need to keep your drive on the medium length par 4 ninth to the left to have an open angle to the green. The tenth is an adventure and a beast from the back tees—about 620 yards, down into a valley for about 250 yards, then about 100 feet uphill for about the last 370. One thing I like about long uphill holes is that the put a real premium on hitting the ball solidly. You can be stuck on that hill for awhile if you don’t. And this hole does a good job of keeping the additional challenges to a minimum, which is a nice change of pace. There’s a single bunker about 125 yards short of the green but if you can’t carry it, there’s room to go around it on the right. The hole also offers a nice change of scenery as it opens up into a beautiful, sprawling meadow.

The eleventh is a beautiful mid-length par 4, sweeping left around two fairway bunkers then back uphill to a plateau green. The twelfth takes us back through a meadow, doglegging gently to the left to a green that is unnecessarily difficult to hit; shallow and on a plateau, with a trough of rough block the run-up to most of the green. As with the fourth and eighth, I’m not sure why Jones wanted to make it so difficult to hit this green, especially when everything else is already so difficult.

Including the medium long par 3 thirteenth to a very wide, but very shallow green that has a high left and low right tier. There isn’t much much of a good place to miss here. The fourteenth features a downhill, semi-blind drive where the fairway abruptly ends at a ravine about 125 yards short of the green. From here, it’s a shot over a lot of lost golf balls (I found a few nice ones) to a deep but narrow green. It’s one of the better approach shots on the course for my liking because you probably won’t lose a ball if you get it up there and most recovery shots are manageable.

The next hole is a short par 4 that isn’t really drivable—but that didn’t stop everyone in the 28-person outing in front of us from trying and slowing the pace of play to three hours for the back nine (due, I suspect, entirely to this hole because the pace slowed to nothing as we approached this tee then it picked back up for the last three holes). It’s a well-designed hole, narrowing as you get closer to the green, but they need to clear a lot of trees and junk around the tee because the fairway is barely visible from the tips.

After a short, uphill par 3 which shouldn’t be too hard if you don’t pull it left down onto the seventeenth tee, the medium length par 4 seventeenth opens back up into a meadow. You need to stay left of the two right side fairway bunkers to have an open shot to a shallow, very Trent Jones green complex, with two bunkers in front and one behind built into one of two mounds.

The last is a long straight par 5 with a large fairway bunker on the left. Although there’s a lot of room right, you should keep your drive to the left because from the right rough, you’ll be partially blocked by trees. All that you need to do with the second is to keep it ahead of you and hopefully, get it to a yardage that you like to give you an easier shot to the small, heavily sloped green.

You might be surprised about the critical tone of most of this review after I said in the beginning that I have a soft spot from this course and find it a lot of fun to play. 17 foot wide greens with ponds on both sides and good lay-ups that result in lost playing companions don’t sound like a lot of fun (well, maybe the latter depends on the playing companion…). But thinking back on it, here’s the sense that I can make of that—individually, many of the holes are too severe, but the collective experience of playing them is fun because playing the course feels like a real adventure, taking you through many different settings…up and down hills, out into meadows, into the middle of ponds. It’s a great place to drive a golf cart around and drink a few beers with your friends…although they should have a blood alcohol limit about half of the legal one out here because driving the cart is at least as much of an adventure as playing the holes. And most of the holes really aren’t bad, although I wouldn’t say that any stands out as being particularly great.
Overall, the Jones is a tough course to rate. I’d definitely recommend playing here, but I wouldn’t say that it’s a really good course. It’s probably the worst of the four main Treetops courses, but I’d rather play it again than one or two of the others and I’d certainly recommend playing it to a first time visitor who didn’t have time to play all of them. It’s a pretty unique experience and definitely pure northern Michigan.

The fourth full-length Treetops course—which I’ll call Smith II because it was the second full-length course here designed by part-owner Rick Smith—was designed to be a more playable and walkable companion to its often unplayable and always unwalkable older siblings (although I was the only one walking it on a busy Sunday morning in summer 2020). It’s a beautiful golf course over land that’s just the right hilliness for golf. As on his previous course, Smith fringed the bunkers with long grass but he added fewer of them and also widened the fairways and toned down the green contours relative to his previous effort. So it’s definitely not one of the more difficult resort courses in northern Michigan, but there are plenty of those already. With a handful of excellent holes, it’s a very good course that compares favorably to most public courses in the state.

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The opening par 4 is very forgiving off the tee, but has several bunkers that can catch inaccurate shots to the green. The medium length par 4 second features a beautiful drive down into a valley with a bunker on the left about 260 out. At this point, the hole narrows and turns gradually right, uphill to a narrow but deep green. The first two bunkers as we approach the green create an illusion, as they’re about 30 yards short of the green. The first two holes characterize the course well-the first is wide open and not too hard, while the second increases the challenge, but isn’t ‘very difficult.’ Both are very attractive and have clever design elements.

The par 5 third has a very wide driving and lay-up zone. But if you want to challenge the green, you’ll have to skirt the long grass and fairway bunkers left. So it’s a pretty easy hole for high handicappers and presents a challenging task for long-hitting, low handicap golfers.

The next two holes are attractive medium long par 4s, both with down hill drives. The fourth continues downhill, doglegging slightly right to a green set into a right-to-left slope with (again) several green side bunkers while the approach to the fifth features a very attractive approach slightly uphill through a valley, encouraging a run up shot. Neither is too difficult or strategic, but there are several bunkers to catch errant shots.

After a lovely downhill par 3 that’s well-defended by bunkers, we come to the seventh, a slight dogleg right short par 4. There’s more room in the fairway than it appears, with the second fairway bunker being out of range. A drive up the right side opens up a slightly better angle to the large green. The eighth is also a short par 4 and again, a drive to the right opens up the angle to the green. But the placement of the drive is much more important here because the green angles front right to back left and is narrow, deep, and two-tiered…running front-to-back. You don’t see too many two-tiered greens where the lower tier is in the back (although the Fazio course has two overdone ones). It’s an interesting twist and this is a good hole.

But not as good as the ninth, which is the best hole on the front nine and one of the best par 3s at Treetops. It’s a medium length par 3 running slightly uphill a beautiful green. There’s all kinds of trouble to the right, including trees that will catch a push and long grass. The left also looks challenging with a bunker and long grass, but the bunkers are well short of the green and there’s much more green over there than appears. All of these subtleties plus the lovely setting make for an excellent par 3.

The next two holes are a back-and-forth short par 5 and long par 4. We were downwind on the former, so the par was essentially reversed. Fortunately the wind wasn’t as strong as it had been the day before we played, evidence for which you can see in the 75 foot tall sugar maple that had been knocked down about 100 yards off the tenth tee. Both holes are well-suited to any wind, with ample width off the tee and in the approach to the greens, although the tenth is best approached from the right.

The twelfth is another excellent par 3—about 200 yards from the back tee rising slightly uphill and on a slight left-to-right slope. Again, the bunkering here is excellent and reminds me of images of classic parkland courses—one well short of the green on its line to the left, a second front right, and a third back left.

We cross a road into a more heavily wooded section of the property for the next two holes but again, there’s substantial width. The thirteenth is a short, downhill par 4 where apparently it’s possible for an even not-long hitter (like me) to drive the green. But I’m not sure that this is the best play as the ball tend to run to the right side of the fairway down there and the green is narrow with a bunker right.

The fourteenth is another excellent hole; a mid-length par 4 where you drive out of a chute of trees over a valley with a large fairway bunker on the left. There’s another fairway bunker to the right, but it’s not in play unless you’re someone who drinks seven protein shakes a day. The approach is a beauty, to a small green tucked to the left, slightly up a hill. But there’s plenty of room to bailout right or to run the ball onto the green from there. Although with the two previous par 3s, this is a great hole and a standout both on Smith II and generally at the Treetops Resort.

We have two more fairly short but heavily bunkered par 3s at the fifteenth and seventeenth. Both greens have high right and low left sides and are deeper than they are wide. They’re almost identical holes, except the former is in the woods and the latter is in a field. The sixteenth is a long and tough par 4, doglegging right over an eye candy bunker. The drive is very close to the forest line on the left, so it’s easy to get nervous and spray your ball toward the trees on the right. Fortunately, they’re pretty far out but this will leave you with a long second that again, is to a green that gives you a good opportunity to run the ball on.

The eighteenth is a medium length par 5 in the back-and-forth stretch with ten, eleven, and sixteen. There isn’t too much trouble from tee to green here but the green angles from front-left to back-right and you’ll want to play your lay-up over the second set of fairway bunkers on the left, toward the one left of the green. Again, there’s a lot more room between these than it seems.

Overall, I found Smith II to be a very well designed golf course. Rick Smith was clearly trying to let up on the gas from his previous effort Smith I, which was narrower and had more undulating greens. But while the critic might want a few of the fairways to be a bit narrower and/or a handful of centerline bunkers to create more strategy off the tee, the ample green side bunkering and angled greens help create this. It’s a course that gives everyone an opportunity to score, yet can still give the good player trouble if they’re not hitting their irons well. It’s a course that all but maybe the plus handicap should like (although they probably won’t mind shooting 63) and should be more highly regarded both at Treetops and among all public courses in the state. I have it in my personal top 20 among public courses in the state; not every hole is a masterpiece, but there are a handful of excellent ones and no bad ones.

For some reason in the last few years, Treetops has become the most under-appreciated collection of golf courses in the state of Michigan. The Jones and Fazio courses used to be mainstays on Golf Digest lists of the top 25 courses in the state an for years, the Fazio course was on Golf Magazine’s top 100 public courses in the country. But I don’t know if they’ve been skimping on their advertising budget or failing to bribe the right people at the magazines because none of the courses have been appearing on the major lists in recent years. And that’s a shame because while I’m not sure than any belongs on a list of top 100 public courses anymore with all of the great new ones in the past few years, at least a few of them should still easily make the top 25 in Michigan.

And that includes part-owner Rick Smith’s Signature Course, which was the first of two full length courses that he designed at Treetops and which I’ll refer to as Smith I because I hate the pretentious names that they’ve given their courses (the Jones ‘Masterpiece;’ the Fazio ‘Premier’). Smith I still rightfully shows up on Golfweek’s top 20 public courses in the state, although near the bottom of the list. I’d have it in the top 10. It’s an excellent course.

The drawback here, as with the other Treetops courses (except for Smith II) is that it’s unwalkable. That’s fine in practice because no one goes on vacation to a northern Michigan resort course with the intention of walking (except maybe me and about 4 other people). But it’d be nice if the routing fit together a bit better so that there weren’t 250 yard cart rides between several of the holes. I don’t know what the available property looked like and I don’t know how feasible it would have been to create a walkable course here (the land around the first and eighteenth hole suggests not very), but I’m sure that they could have tightened the routing up a bit if they’d had some reason to do so. But they didn’t, so it’s a golf carting adventure deep into the dark northern Michigan woods.

The first hole is a typical northern Michigan starting hole; down a hill to a saddle-shaped fairway with deep woods on both sides. In fact, it’s very similar to the first hole on the neighboring Fazio course, just on the other side of the driving range. This one is a bit too narrow for my liking, but this won’t be a general problem for the rest of the course. The big green with a ridge separating it into front and back sections is typical for the rest of the course. There’s another at the downhill par 3 second and if I have one criticism of the design (other than the routing), it’s that there are too many green separated by ridges into sections and not enough wavy interior contours.

But as we can see with the beautiful long downhill par 4 third, the bunkers are very attractive and make you think your way around the course. We have lots of fairway to the left but we can see that the green is to the right, so a drive that skirts these fairway bunkers will shorten the approach. The second shot is to a very attractive, very deep green. A high ridge in the middle bisects the green into lower right and back segments (like at the first) and short grass chipping areas will collect most errant shots. This hole exemplifies the beautiful green sites and bunkering that are common throughout the course.

Including at the par 3 fourth. Over ferns and with bunkers on three sides, I’ve always thought that this was one of the most attractive par 3s in the state. But while it doesn’t appear so, the green is large. The fifth is a tough uphill par 4 with trees encroaching on the left and right. It shouldn’t be too difficult if you hit the fairway, but it’s probably more uphill than it appears and it’s easy to come up short on the approach.

The sixth is the first of only 3 par 5s, but they’re all very good. This is another wide-open fairway, but there’s a bunker in the middle about 300 yards out…right where you’d (correctly) suspect that you should drive the ball. After this, the hole turns left and narrows in the lay-up zone, but then opens up just in front of the green. Still, you’ll want to keep your lay-up to the right because a shot from the left will be over a bunker to a green sloping away from you.

After a nice looking dogleg left medium length par 4 to a green nicely sited in a gradual upward slope, we have a medium length par 3 over a huge fronting bunker. This one is tough, especially to a back left pin because the green is shallow (over is dead). You can use a ridge running from back-to-front in the middle of the green to feed the ball to these pins. It’s best not to be too aggressive with the line, but a miss in the front right to a back left pin will likely result in a 4. 

The next few holes give us a change of scenery and are all very good. The downhill par 4 ninth plays to a green that angles front right to back left behind a bunker and runs downhill in this direction, except for a bank at the back left. You can run the ball onto the front right of the green and use the contours to feed it to the back left. It’s a very interesting green, although I’d like it even more if the bunker in front were smaller or more to the left, creating more room to run the ball on the green here.

Ten is another excellent par 5, out into a meadow then back into the woods. The landing area is generous but it tightens the screws with the lay-up, which has bunkers encroaching on the left, right online with the opening to the green.

The par 3 eleventh is a bit claustrophobic, but at only about 140 yards, you should be able to get over that. It’s another interesting setting, surrounded by pointy balsam firs and arborvitae. The variety of landscapes is one of the standout features on the course. We might think of this as a drawback because it suggests that the course will lack visual cohesion but the different landscapes blend into each other here. And it creates a sense of adventure, which we might as well have if we're in golf carts. Nine came out of the trees toward a field, ten played through that field back into a forest at its end, then we turned left into a lower area, which in this part of the state means a natural change of landscape from hardwoods to conifers.

And the medium length par 4 twelfth plays back across the other side of the meadow to the edge of the forest whence we came. Although the fairway bunkers are on the right, you want to keep your tee ball left to open up the best angle down the green. Thirteen takes us back through the deep woods and is a very difficult uphill par 4. While there’s a bit more room that there appears off the tee, the green is elevated with several fronting bunkers and is very difficult to hit off anything less than an excellent drive.

The next three holes consist of a par of similar medium length par 4s doglegging gently left around bunkers sandwiching an uphill par 5 with a deep, skinny green in a saddle. The fairway on fourteen runs out on the right and the sixteenth has a gentle reverse camber so you have to be very careful that you don’t run through them into the woods. The par 5 fifteenth has a more inviting tee shot but you need to be very careful that you place a lay-up in line with the green or don’t spray your ball if going for the green because both sides of the green are hills covered with bunkers and junk.

After a long ride up a hill through the woods that was almost as hard on our golf cart as it would be walking for the average person who plays this course, we come to the medium-length, downhill par 3 seventeenth. The green is big and you should be able to hit it but if you don’t, unless you’re short, you’re in trouble.

The last hole is a very dramatic short par 4, downhill then uphill to a green shelved to the left into the side of a huge hill. While you might be tempted to cut it close to the line of the green past the standalone maple tree, there’s no good reason to do this. Just play it out to the right, short of the eye candy bunkers through the fairway. Try to play to a yardage about 10-15 short of what you like for the approach because that’s how much this shot plays uphill. Not my favorite hole, but an attractive finish to the round.

Despite my issues with the routing, Smith I is a very good course, and cracks my top 10 public courses in the state (at least if Black Forest doesn’t open back up). Most holes are very strategic, but give the weaker players who seem to comprise the vast majority of the resort’s clientele enough room to play. Although I have issues with the sameness and severity of the greens, they are interesting and big enough to hold shots. Finally, the variety of landscapes really adds to the experience of playing the course. So get in your golf cart, check the breaks (don’t even think about shifting it into neutral), and you’re off for one of northern Michigan’s best forest golf adventures.

Now for my review of the final public course on the Michigan Mike DeVries golf trail, Greywalls. Greywalls is certainly the premier course of the four. It’s ranked as one of the top courses overall in the state and is perennially on all of the magazine lists of the top 100 public courses in the country (and appears to be moving up those lists lately). There’s no doubt that Greywalls is deserving of these accolades.

The major question with Greywalls appears to be (1) ‘just how good is it? With respect to other courses in the state of Michigan, there are two related questions: (2) is it the best public course in the state? (3) is it better than the one private member of the DeVries golf trail, the Kingsley Club (just outside of Traverse City)? I’ll give my answers to these questions and then use the rest of this review to explain my reasoning: (1) excellent, certainly deserving of its high rankings in the state and on the top 100 public lists; (2) for me, not quite; (3) again, for me, not quite.

Although I think that Greywalls is an excellent course and easily one of the top 3 public courses in the state, I have some serious reservations about a few of the holes. Like at the Kingsley Club, there are a few holes that go a bit too far and on both courses, it’s issues with several of the greens. Many of the greens are convex, meaning that they slope away at their edges, often down short grass-covered hills into collection areas.

The course most famous for this feature is Pinehurst no.2. While this style of greens has become much more popular in recent years with the ‘New Golden Age of Golf Course Architecture,’ no course that I’ve seen that employs this feature has gotten the balance right the way that Pinehurst no.2 does. Pinehurst no.2 works so well because most areas around the greens are only built up a few feet, so the ball doesn’t run away that far and the subsequent pitch/putt isn’t so nerve wracking. There are a few severe run-offs around the greens at no.2, but there is always a fairly large place to miss that leaves a straightforward shot. But some of the convex greens at Greywalls (like 1, 13, and 14) don’t leave much room to miss and the shots from around them are very hit-and-hope, leading to more green-complex-induced Xs than I think any other course that I’ve seen.

But not all the greens are like this. Most of them aren’t. Several (5, 6, 9) are sited in (natural?) granite bowls. Almost all of them have very interesting surface contours. The green surface contours are one of the real highlights—certainly one of the best sets of green surfaces in the state. And of course, it’s visually stunning and unique, with the namesake granite walls coming into play several times on the front nine. The wild contours of the property are used beautifully throughout. So for me, it’s a great course, but one with a lot of highs and some lows—at bit like the (in)famous Tobacco Road North Carolina…although there aren’t nearly as many lows on Greywalls.
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Unfortunately, we start with a low on the first hole. But not until we get to the green. From a high point overlooking Marquette and Lake Superior, the first tee is one of the most beautiful in the state. And from tee to green, the hole is excellent. The tee shot is downhill to a wide fairway and while it tightens on the second shot, there’s still ample room to lay-up.

But the green is perhaps the most unfortunate thing on a Michigan golf course. If you miss short, left, or right, it rolls at least 30 feet down an at least 10 foot high hill of short grass. So you’re left with that 10 foot uphill shot and if you’ve missed left or right, the green is shallow. This makes for a shot that’s probably not as hard as it looks, but it looks so hard that you’ll probably screw up your chip, which is what most people I’ve played with have done here. The back-and-forth-X-on-the-first-hole is probably less likely if you miss short because then you have the length of the green to play to (if the ball doesn’t come back to your feet). 

When I played here for the first time about 10 years ago, I determined that long (toward the second tee) is the best miss. I got to test that theory this time (August 2020) because that’s where I hit my third shot. And yes, it’s a much less intimidating shot because it doesn’t look like you’ll go back-and-forth, but it’s still very hard because the green runs away from you. And because of that, you could still knock it off the other side if you aren’t careful...and still get a back-and-forth X.

The second tee shot is characteristic of Greywalls—a wide, tumbling fairway. Here, you want to be up the left side for a better look at the wide, but shallow green. There’s a good amount of room to run your ball up the left side and onto the green but if you’ve hit a good tee shot, you’ll probably go straight at the pin (and you’d better be on with the distance). The green has a pretty severe tier running from front-to-back in the middle, with a high, left side and lower, larger right side.

The medium-length par 3 third isn’t severe at all—which is nice after the first two holes. That brings us to the fourth, which is my favorite hole at Greywalls. Here we have a very wide fairway split by a granite ledge. The high left side is the preferred angle and shortens the distance to the green. But to pull this off, you have to hit a long, straight drive to the top of the hill. If you don’t get it far enough, you have a blind second shot. If you miss it right, it just rolls down to the lower part of the fairway (if it doesn’t get stuck in the rocks). I like that if you go for the alpha drive to the left and don’t pull it off, you’ll get to hit the next one from fairway, just from a much less advantaged (blind, awkward lie) spot. Usually on these kind of strategic, multi-option tee shots if you don’t pull it off, you’re in a bunker, a pond, or in some junk where you’re more likely to get lyme disease than find your ball.

The next three holes are the most distinctive at Greywalls. The short par 4 fifth has one of the most difficult, uphill tee shots that I’ve seen, through a saddle of granite on one side and trees on the other. But this shot is easier than it looks; if you hit it at least 200 yards from the back tees, it opens up and you have a good view of the green at the base of a huge granite wall.

The sixth is the par 3 that they usually put on the promotional material for the course. The green is in a large granite bowl with a granite wall about 50 yards short. It’s a big, undulating green, one which you don’t want to miss short because it’ll roll about 20 yards down a hill or right, because your shot to the back of the green will be blocked by part of the granite bowl and your next one will probably go 20 yards down the hill in the front. But it’s a pretty big target and overall, a reasonable challenge.

The seventh is gorgeous and a lot of fun. If you’re a long hitter or move up to a reasonable set of tees, hitting a straight ball will result in going over a granite ledge and getting another 50-100 yards of roll. You can also go left of the ridge, but you’ll have a blind shot and won’t get the fairway roll (or just lose the ball in the woods). The second shot is downhill to a beautiful, very undulating large green. If you miss left, the ball runs away 25 yards into an impossible shot, but the green is plenty big and there’s ample room to miss short.

I’m not a big fan of the eighth, which has a very narrow, severe right-to-left sloping fairway and a very narrow green with a steep drop-off in the front and on the sides into bunkers. The ninth hole is beautiful and very good. The major feature here is a bunker about 260 out from the back tee that cuts across most of the fairway. Very long hitters can clear it and leave a short second. The rest of us can either lay-up and have a blind second shot or go to the right and have an awkward angle to the right-to-left sloping green. I think I’d like this hole a bit more if the bunker were about half the side and you could skirt a straight drive past it. Currently, there isn’t much room to run the ball around it on the right because the long grass cuts into the fairway. It’s still a very good hole but I think that this is another example where the challenge is turned up a little bit more than it needed to be.

The back nine is very different in character. It has fewer granite outcroppings and more bunkers. The short par 4 tenth is a bit more in character with the front, although on much flatter land. Here, the primary challenge is that the large, undulating green angles front-left to back-right along a grass-covered granite outcropping, which sets up a tough, blind shot if you’re in the right half of the very wide fairway. It’s still very playable from over there (one of my playing partners hit it to 3 feet from the far right edge of the fairway), but it’s a much easier approach if you stay left of the boulder in the middle of the fairway.

The eleventh is noticeably different from the rest of the course. It has seemingly half of the course’s bunkers. After 4 playings, I’m still not sure where the best place to hit the tee ball is, but the key here is to understand the size and shape of the green. It’s very large and angled front-right to back-left. If you err a bit right and short, you should be ok. In the photo below, the green is just left of the furthest bunker in the center.

The twelfth is a very long par 4 with a very wide fairway that you’ll need because you need to drive the ball as far as you can. The green is benched into a hill and there’s a bunker in the middle of the fairway just short of it. There isn’t enough room to run the ball around it to the right, so you have to have a short enough shot that you can either carry and stop it on the green, or carry the bunker and not have it run too hot. I’d prefer it if there were a bit more room right to use the slope of the fairway to run the ball on the green, but a very hard hole like this is fine when the misses don’t all leave severe shots (which most on this hole don’t).

The first two shots on the long par 5 thirteenth are pretty standard for a championship-style course—wide open fairway for the tee shot, but a bunker on the left for long hitters and staggered bunkers in the lay-up zone, first right, then left. But even if you hit two good shots and leave yourself 120 yards (it’s a long par 5), you’re shooting to a convex green almost completely covered by bunkers to covering the front right and left (small opening in the front left). It’s a deep green and the smart thing to do, wherever the pin is, is to play to the middle. But thanks to the front bunkers, it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of room up there, so it’s an intimidating shot. Going over is dead. If I could tweak this hole, I’d remove the left-most of the front right bunkers to enable players to play a safe shot to the front with lower risk of a bunker back-and-forth disaster.

Tee to green, the long par 4 fourteenth hole is beautiful. There’s a ravine left and a small grove of trees right, but there’s ample room even for someone who sprays the ball. The green site is also lovely; it’s situated in a nice bowl with the aforementioned ravine short and left, sloping gradually higher to the right toward the thirteenth fairway. It looks a lot like the wonderful ravine holes at DeVries’ Diamond Springs.

But I have some real problems with the green. Like the first green, it’s almost completely built up from its surroundings. It angles from short-right to the line of play to back-left. But the only really safe miss here is a small window short of the green. Any other miss around this green, which isn’t particularly large, leaves the player looking several feet uphill to a green which is shallow and convex. Again, it feels like a Pinehurst no.2 green, but cranked up too much. Sure you can miss short right, but this works better in theory than in practice because the area just short of the green from which you’d have a reasonable chip is only 20 or 30 feet wide. It’s just too small to be a safe zone. Given that the green sits in a big bowl, this would have been a nice opportunity to have a big, undulating, concave green, maybe with some bunkers along the ravine (Tom Fazio would have loved this green site). Given the length and difficulty of the rest of the hole, this would have been a fitting conclusion.

I really like the closing four holes. Fifteen is an excellent long par 3; about 240 from the back tee but you can roll the ball through short grass onto the high left, low right two tiered green if you carry your tee ball 200 yards. The sixteenth is a reverse camber fairway doglegging right. It’s really important to shape the ball left to right here. The approach to the green is uphill and the green has a bit of a trough running through the center from back to front. Although there’s an opportunity to lose the ball right off the tee into the rocks and junk, it’s a pretty reasonable challenge--just be conservative with your drive.

The seventeenth is a short par 3 with a wild green. Although it looks like you really don’t want to hit in in the bunkers short, what you really don’t want to do is go over the green into another of the roided-up Pinehurst collection areas. But again, it’s a reasonable challenge, this time because the green is so large.

The eighteenth is a beautiful downhill par 5 with a concave fairway. If you’re a good player and you hit a decent drive, you should easily be able to reach the green in two. The second shot is actually a bit anti-climatic; the hole opens up into a wide flat plane and the (huge) green just sits there without much defense. Not surprisingly there is some defense—the green is crowned with a lot of little contours everywhere. Unless you’re near the hole, it’s a tough two putt.

So this critical review might give the impression that I didn’t like the course. This isn’t true. I think that it’s an excellent course with some of the best and most interesting holes in the state of Michigan. It’s easily one of the three best public courses in the state and even though I wouldn’t have it as #1, it’s not a stretch at all to argue that it is. Most of the holes are very playable and almost every hole will reward you for thinking your way around it. Moreover, there’s great variety of challenges. Sometimes it’s important to place your drive. Sometimes you need to bomb away to try to shorten the approach. Often there are slopes that you can use to feed the ball toward the landing area/green. But just as often, slopes will take you in the wrong direction. Course knowledge is important here, but it’s always very difficult.

The reason I’ve been so tough here it is that with a few tweaks, it’d be indisputably the best public course in the state. It would have been easy to build an awful (but still spectacular) course here, but so much of what Mike DeVries is so bold and so good that he raises your expectations about how it all should be. For my liking, as at Kingsley, there are a few too many moments that are unnecessarily difficult (my playing partners in my first round of this trip would agree; this course can bring a single-digit handicap to their knees) and these hold it back a bit. But it’s still worth the drive up from Detroit or Chicago every once in awhile because there’s nothing like it.

The Mines is one of the three prongs of the Mike DeVries golf trail in the Grand Rapids area. This one is actually in Grand Rapids, only a few minutes from downtown. It's on an old gypsum mine, which kicked up a lot of sand and gave DeVries an opportunity to build some flashy holes, especially for such an otherwise modest course. The property is very good generally; hilly, but not too severe. Except for the high tension power lines that bisect the property, it’s an ideal site for a golf course.


The first is a medium length par 4 to a saddle-shaped and somewhat narrow fairway, but which opens up as you approach the green. The green is tough, with a huge false front on the right side. Fortunately, the surface is large enough that you should be able to get it and keep it up there. The second also plays to a saddle-shaped fairway—I get the sense that the first and second were routed over ridges, which DeVries massaged (i.e. bulldozed) into saddles. In any case, they're both attractive and challenging driving holes. The approach sets up best from the left, requiring you to skirt the fairway bunker on the left.

The par 4 third has an attractive drive over a patch of attractive long blue grass to a rolling fairway that slopes to the right. The green is a DeVries special; built on a plateau with severe drop-offs into the woods left and long. But a miss short isn’t too bad that the fairways weren’t cut tight enough for a shot missed left to run too far away.

After an uphill/sidehill short par 4, we have an unfortunately long walk to reach the fifth tee. The fourth green and fifth tee are actually close to each other, but all traffic is routed though a tunnel 100-some yards to the left by the first tee. The very long par 5 fifth has attractive sand dunes down the left, but isn’t too interesting unless you’re playing with a right-hander who slices, in which case you might get to see them take out a windshield on the road down the right.

The sixth is an interesting medium length par 4, doglegging slightly right and running up hill to a green fronted by three bunkers short left and one short right. This would be a very attractive hole too if it weren’t for the power lines running down the right side and framing the approach to the green.

The back-to-back par 3s seven and eight are the strength of the front nine. The seventh is medium short with a green angled from front-right to back-left at the base of a dune. The short eighth plays over a grassy, sandy bowl to a green perched over two bunkers and more sandy waste area. DeVries was really smart to build back-to-back two par 3s here because the land is very attractive for golf, but too severe to build a long hole without bulldozing the features that make the land interesting.

The medium length par 4 ninth has a very wide fairway and the most heavily bunkered green on the course at the base of the clubhouse. After another medium length par 4, we come to the par 3 eleventh, which is actually two holes. This hole has two sets of tees that create angles 90 degrees apart into its north-south oriented deep, but shallow green. For some reason, I forgot to take a picture of either angle, but the longer north-facing tees play down the length of the green and the shorter west-facing tees into its shallow aspect. There’s a severe drop off on the east side of the green, which I think makes the tee shot from the south tees too difficult (we played the west, into the slope).

We cross under the power lines for the next six holes, which is the strongest stretch on the course. The part 4 twelfth isn’t the most interesting from tee-to-green, but the green is excellent; wavy, with a tier back-right and bowls front-left and back-right. The long par 4 thirteenth is, along with the sixteenth, the course’s most difficult hole. It goes gradually uphill around two fairway bunkers to a green built up from its down-sloping surroundings. I would have preferred the green for such a long, difficult hole to be built at grade-level, but this would have left a blind shot (not a problem for me, but not the best thing on a public golf course).

The par 4 fourteenth is a beauty, with a big, rolling fairway with a high right and low left side. You have to keep it short of a big bunker left that cuts off the fairway. The green sits on the natural grade and might be the course’s best, with a flat left side and sloping continuously right down the hill. This green might be close to unplayable at high speeds, but that wasn’t an issue in the summer of 2019.

The short par 3 fifteenth plays to a wide green that effectively plays shallow because of a tier running left-to-right through the middle. Getting the ball to and keeping it on the back tier is very difficult. Speaking of very difficult, the long, uphill par 4 sixteenth has three fairway bunkers right where you’d like to drive it. But if you can’t carry them, there’s plenty of room to play around them to the left (lengthening the hole, of course). Like the fourteenth, this green appears to sit right on the natural grade and is beautiful. It slopes continuously off to the front left but again, the ball won’t run too far away.

The Mines is an excellent course and pairs nicely with the other two Grand Rapids prongs of the DeVries golf trail—not to mention a few beers and dinner at the nearby Founder’s Brewery. I’d have it a bit behind Diamond Springs and Pilgrim’s Run because it doesn’t have the great holes of the former and the strategy of the latter. But we shouldn’t necessarily compare every course to the best (among which those are), especially when they’re so close to highly populated areas and have low green fees, like this one. It’s a terrific course to have in your backyard and golf in the US would be much healthier if there were more like it. If The Mines were in southeastern Michigan, it’d easily be one of the top three public courses—out of at least 100.