Town Guides / Michigan
The Arcadia Golf Guide
You see the lake before you understand the golf. Arcadia Bluffs sits high above Lake Michigan in northwest lower Michigan, and the Bluffs Course is set 180 feet above the water by the town hook's measure, on ground that drops 225 feet from its highest point and runs along 3,100 feet of lake frontage. Numbers like that usually decorate a brochure. Here they are the golf. Elevation, wind off the lake, and 245 acres of bluff top terrain are what every shot at the Bluffs is actually played against.
Warren Henderson and Rick Smith designed the Bluffs Course, founded in 1999. Par 72, 7,300 yards, a 75.7 rating and a 146 slope. It was designed to resemble seaside Irish links, with rolling terrain and windswept fescues, on the shore of a Great Lake that behaves like a sea when the weather turns. It ranks No. 3 in Michigan in the Golf Digest 2025-26 ranking and was formerly in America's 100 Greatest. Public access. That combination, a top three course in a deep golf state that anyone can book, is why Arcadia, a small town in Manistee County, pulls golfers from across the country.
Then there is the second course, and Arcadia's real luxury is that the second course argues with the first. The South Course, built in 2018 by Dana Fry and Jason Straka, sits inland and takes its design inspiration from C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor, with Chicago Golf Club as a reference. Squared greens. Steep walled, flat floor bunkers. Greens averaging about 9,400 square feet, fairways running 50 to 70 yards wide. Par 72, 7,412 yards, a 75.6 rating, and a No. 7 ranking in Michigan in Golf Digest 2025-26. Two courses in the Michigan top 10, at one public club, built on opposite design philosophies nineteen years apart.
How to play Arcadia
Play the Bluffs first if it is your first visit. It is the famous one, the lakeside one, and the one whose ground you will describe to people afterward, and in our Arcadia town guide ranking and the Michigan state ranking it leads the town for a reason. But play it with your expectations set correctly. The Bluffs is not a gentle resort walk above a pretty lake. A 146 slope at 7,300 yards in lake wind is a serious test, and the Irish links styling means the ball runs and the fescue waits. Golfers who arrive thinking the scenery is the point shoot big numbers and blame the wind. The wind was always the point.
Play the South second, and play it attentively, because the South is the course architecture readers will argue about in the car afterward. Macdonald and Raynor template ideas, squared greens and steep walled bunkers, executed at a modern scale with wide fairways and huge greens, in Michigan farmland country south of the bluffs. It is longer than the Bluffs, rates almost identically, and plays completely differently. Where the Bluffs asks you to manage wind and terrain, the South asks you to solve geometry, angles into squared surfaces, bunkers placed as arguments rather than decoration. Golfers who love classic American design often leave Arcadia preferring the South, which tells you how good the second course is.
The mistake visitors make is playing 18 and leaving. Arcadia is a long drive from almost everywhere, and the two courses are different enough that one round shows you half the club. If you can only do one day, do 36, Bluffs in the morning and South after, or reverse it if wind is forecast to build. If you have two days, play each twice, because both courses change character with wind direction, and the Bluffs in particular is a different test when the lake is calm than when it is not.
Both courses are public, which is the access reality and the gift of the place. No member sponsor, no resort room requirement hidden in the record, just a booking and a drive to Manistee County. Arcadia has no private anchor course diluting the guide. The town's golf is these two courses, and they are enough to justify any itinerary in Michigan golf.
End the day back up on the bluff, 180 feet over the lake, watching the light go down over water that stretches past the horizon. The South may win the architecture argument. The Bluffs wins the evening, every time, and it is not close.