I started my planning with the goal of playing the top five Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play in the state and added plenty more, including four days in the Upper Peninsula hosting a tournament for Golfweek’s Best raters. The only rule was the courses had to offer spots on their tee sheets to non-members.

This trip started with an airport arrival in Detroit and meandered all the way north into the Upper Peninsula along the shores of Lake Superior with samples of everything from daily-fee options with one course to a winter-season ski destination with 10 tracks. Landing in Detroit and cruising west toward Lake Michigan, I would tee it up at 15 layouts – including a new par-3 course – and put some 1,400 miles on my rental car’s odometer before dropping it off in Milwaukee, the easiest major airport for me to reach after sliding my carry bag back into its travel case at the end of the trip. I was there to see as many courses as I could fit into 11 days. The Links nine at Boyne’s Bay Harbor Golf Club in Michigan (Courtesy of Boyne Golf/Evan Schiller) Not bad for a state where the golf season doesn’t stretch much past seven months before the snow falls in many locales.

Outsiders might expect states such as California, Arizona and Florida to be packed with solid golf, but a recent study of Golfweek’s Best ranked courses revealed that Michigan offers the seventh-best sampling of elite public-access layouts in the country, ahead of such golf-heavy destinations as Hawaii and Virginia. Outside Detroit and a few midsize cities, the Great Lakes State is the embodiment of Midwestern agrarian living, this despite it being the 10th-most populous state among the 50.Īnd thanks to a boom of golf course developments over the past 25 years mixed with a handful of exceptional classic tracks, Michigan offers what could be considered a surprisingly inspiring spread of public-access layouts. Michigan is more rural than an outsider might expect, full of farms and small-town crossroads. Tall cornfields and billboards advertising only the finest marijuana edibles. Blue jean jackets and gas stations attached to liquor stores. Grand lake views stretched to the horizon. Narrow two-line highways and trees – so many trees.

Top 50 Modern Courses in Great Britain & Ireland.

Top 50 Classic Courses in Great Britain & Ireland.

Mexico, Caribbean, Atlantic islands, Central America.

Top 40 par-3, short and non-traditional courses.

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