# Osprey Meadows at Tamarack Resort: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/osprey-meadows-at-tamarack-resort-profile/

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Course Profiles / Idaho


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Osprey Meadows has already lived two lives. Robert Trent Jones Jr. designed it at Tamarack Resort in Donnelly, opening in 2004 above Lake Cascade. The resort's fortunes fell, the course went quiet, and then the revival brought it back: reopened in 2024 after an extensive restoration carried out with the original Robert Trent Jones II design team. Comeback stories in golf usually mean a new architect apologizing for the old one's work. This one is the original team returning to its own course, twenty years on, with the money to finish the argument properly.

The setting does heavy lifting and deserves to. The layout spreads across roughly 400 acres at nearly 5,000 feet of elevation above Lake Cascade, in Valley County. Altitude changes the golf in ways visitors underestimate. The ball flies further in thin mountain air, which flatters your distances on the range and then betrays your judgment on the course, because a 7,447-yard par 73 from the tips at 5,000 feet plays shorter than the card says and longer than your confidence says. The slope of 142 is the honest number. This is a big course on big land, and the restoration leaned into that rather than trimming it back to resort-golf politeness.

Par 73 itself is a tell. Almost nobody builds par 73 anymore, because scorecard symmetry became a habit the industry cannot break. A par 73 usually means the land offered an extra par 5 worth keeping and the architect refused to force the routing into a tidier number. At Osprey Meadows that extra shot of length fits the property: 400 acres gives a designer room to let holes breathe, and the card's odd total is a small promise that the terrain, not a template, set the terms. Golfers notice this without knowing why. The round has a rhythm that feels found rather than installed.

## The hole everyone talks about

The 16th is the signature oddity: it can play as a 412-yard par 4 or a 611-yard par 5 depending on the tees chosen. A hole with two pars sounds like a gimmick until you think about what it asks of a design. The same ground has to make sense as a long, demanding two-shotter and as a three-shot hole with a layup decision, and the green has to receive both a long approach and a wedge. It is the kind of flexibility resort golf actually needs, because the same course hosts a scratch player in the morning and a vacationing 18-handicap after lunch. Most courses solve that problem with five tee boxes and no imagination. Osprey Meadows solved one hole of it by changing what the hole is.

The wider verdict has landed well. Golfweek named Osprey Meadows Idaho's Best Public Course You Can Play and put it on its Top 100 Resort Courses in the US list in 2026. State honors in Idaho come with a caveat, since the state's resort golf scene is compact, and we place it among the bigger names in [the full Idaho ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-idaho/). But a restored course does not collect national resort recognition on scenery alone. The golf has to hold up after the photographs fade.

The concession is the setting itself. Mountain golf at 5,000 feet has a short season and weather that can turn a July afternoon into a negotiation. The course's first life also proved that a great layout cannot outrun a struggling resort; golf this remote depends on the operation around it. For now the operation is investing, the original architects have had their second pass, and Osprey Meadows stands as the rare restoration that made a course bigger in spirit than it was. Play it late in the day, when the light drops toward Lake Cascade and the altitude makes every well-struck iron shot feel borrowed from a better player.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.