Course Profiles / New Hampshire

Bald Peak Colony Club: A Course Profile

The scorecard gives Bald Peak away, if you know how to read it. Five par 3s. Five par 5s. On a par 72 course of 6,515 yards, that distribution is a fingerprint, because modern architects almost never build it and Donald Ross, who designed this Moultonborough course on Lake Winnipesaukee in 1921, built variety as a matter of principle. Five one shotters means five separate green sites asking five separate questions. Five par 5s means five chances to make a decision with a long club in your hands. The card barely averages one bunker per hole. A Ross course with almost no bunkering to speak of defends itself the old way, with green contours, angles, and the land on New Hampshire's biggest lake doing the rest.

GOLF Magazine's raters ranked Bald Peak the No. 1 course in New Hampshire for 2020-21, a verdict that surprises golfers who assume the state's best golf must be its most accessible. Bald Peak is an exclusive private club, and its reputation rests on the thing its members prize and its visitors report in identical language: pristine conditioning. Conditioning is a dull word for a real virtue. On a 1921 Ross routing, immaculate turf is what lets the design speak at its original pitch. Greens that run true make Ross's contours matter. Fairways kept firm make his angles matter. A scruffy Bald Peak would still be a Ross; a pristine one is the argument for why Ross still gets ranked first in a state a century later.

Restoration, not reinvention

The other encouraging line in Bald Peak's record is who has worked on it since. Ron Forse and Jim Nagle have done restoration work on the Ross layout, and that pairing matters. Forse and Nagle built their reputation on bringing Golden Age courses back toward their original intent rather than modernizing them into something their architects would not recognize. For a 1921 Ross with a light bunker scheme and an unusual balance of par 3s and par 5s, the temptation for a lesser project would be to add length, add bunkers, add difficulty, until the card looked conventional. The restoration route protects exactly the features that make Bald Peak distinctive: the 6,515 yards at a rating of 71.6 and a slope of 129, numbers that describe a course meant to be played by its members every day and enjoyed at championship standard of presentation, rather than a course lengthened into an occasional ordeal.

That philosophy fits the place. Bald Peak is a colony club on Lake Winnipesaukee, in Moultonborough, in Carroll County, and its golf exists inside a summer colony's rhythm. The course does not need to host the state open to justify itself. It needs to be the best version of a Ross members' course, on a lake, in the mountains' foothills, kept perfectly. By the available evidence, including the state ranking its raters gave it, that is what it is. The wider state picture is in the New Hampshire state ranking.

The concession

Exclusivity is the concession, and it is a large one. The best course in New Hampshire, by a national magazine's reckoning, is one that almost no New Hampshire golfer can play. A state ranking has to weigh that, and golfers who believe the best course in a state should be one the state's players can actually book will rank Bald Peak lower on principle. There is a principled version of that argument and this publication has some sympathy for it. There is also a scale question: at 6,515 yards, Bald Peak asks nothing of the modern long hitter that he cannot answer with an iron, and a player who equates quality with resistance will find the card short.

Both points stand, and neither overturns the verdict. Ross built members' courses to be replayed a thousand times without going stale, and the five and five card, the near absence of bunkers, and the lake setting are a century old recipe for exactly that. The members of Bald Peak have been replaying it since 1921. The raters who finally put it at the top of New Hampshire were not discovering a secret. They were admitting, in print, what the colony on the lake has known every summer since Ross left: the best golf in the state was behind a gate the whole time.