Course Profiles / Washington
Riverside Golf Club: A Course Profile
On May 21, 1927, Chehalis got nine holes of golf beside the Chehalis-Centralia Airport, and the town has been arguing about them ever since. Riverside Golf Club opened that spring as a small course on flat ground between the airport and the Chehalis River, credited to Jacque de F. Griffin, and it stayed nine holes for more than four decades. In a state where the famous golf sits on Puget Sound or out in the dunes country, Riverside is the other Washington: a working town's course in Lewis County, semi-private, 110 acres, par 71, 6,155 yards from the longest tees.
Short numbers, honest golf. That is the whole pitch, and it holds up better than you would expect.
What 6,155 yards asks of you
A course this length does not test your driver. It tests whether you can leave the ball in the right half of a fairway and whether your wedge game is tidy enough to take advantage of the holes that give you a look. Par 71 at this yardage means the scoring chances are spread out rather than concentrated in a run of reachable par 5s, and a sloppy iron player will bleed shots in ones and twos all afternoon without ever making the big number that wakes him up.
The setting does quiet work. The ground runs between the airport and the river, flat enough that the walk is easy, open enough that a mishit rarely disappears entirely. This is golf you can play every week without it wearing you out, which is exactly what a semi-private club in a town of Chehalis's size needs to be. It received votes in the Cascade Golfer ranking of Washington courses, a small signal that the people who play the region's golf rate it above its yardage. Our full ordering sits in the Washington state ranking, where Riverside's case is about value and repeatability rather than championship weight.
The course grew up in stages, and the stages explain the routing. Nine holes in 1927, expanded to 18 in 1971. Then, in 2009, new ownership took over and reversed the nines so the 18th finishes at the clubhouse. That last change sounds cosmetic and is not. A finishing hole that ends at the clubhouse changes how a match feels on the walk in, and it changes where the club's social gravity sits. Somebody in 2009 understood that the last hundred yards of a round are worth more than the first.
The Lewis County Amateur
Riverside's strongest claim on your attention is an event, not a hole. The club hosts the Lewis County Amateur, described by Inside Golf Newspaper as one of the best amateur events in the Northwest. Small courses live or die on whether serious players bother to show up, and an amateur with a real field tells you the greens roll honestly and the competition is run properly. Plenty of longer, pricier courses in Washington cannot say that.
The concession: if you are chasing a championship test, this is not it, and Riverside does not pretend otherwise. Six thousand one hundred fifty-five yards is six thousand one hundred fifty-five yards. A strong player having a good day will feel he left shots out there rather than survived them, and the flat airport-adjacent ground will never produce the kind of photograph that fills a travel brochure.
But that framing misses what the place is for. Riverside has been Chehalis's golf course since 1927, through nine holes and eighteen, through ownership changes and a flipped routing, and it still draws one of the region's respected amateur fields to a town most Seattle golfers drive past on I-5. Nearly a century in, the little course by the airport is still the room where Lewis County golf happens.