Town Rankings / Michigan

The Best Golf Courses in Arcadia

Arcadia is a village of a few hundred people on Michigan's northwest coast, the kind of place with one main street and a harbor, and it holds thirty six holes of golf that people cross the country to play. The dissonance is the point. Arcadia Bluffs built its Bluffs Course on land 180 feet above Lake Michigan, links flavored golf on a bluff over one of the biggest lakes on earth, and then, instead of building a second course like the first one, it built the South Course inland: a Dana Fry design in tribute to C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor, the geometric template school of American golf's golden age.

So this ranking is a two course town where both courses are destinations, and a genuine argument, not a formality. One course has the lake. The other has the architecture crowd. Golfers fly into Michigan, drive the last quiet miles into Arcadia, and argue about these two courses in the clubhouse like it is a title fight. Here is our decision, and the case for the loser, because the loser deserves one.

1Arcadia Bluffs Bluffs Course

The Bluffs Course sits 180 feet above Lake Michigan, and the height is not a statistic, it is the round. You play along and across a bluff with the lake filling the horizon, wind coming off water that behaves like an ocean, in a setting that makes golfers reach for comparisons to Ireland and Scotland because American golf rarely gives them this. Links flavored golf on a freshwater sea, at elevation, with the light changing by the hour. Setting is one of our scoring categories and the Bluffs maxes it in a way no inland course in the Midwest can answer.

But the ranking is not scenery alone. The Bluffs is a serious test in the wind, a course that asks you to flight the ball, judge ground and air together, and hold your nerve on exposed ground where a loose swing gets announced to the whole lake. Resort courses with famous views often hide soft golf behind the photograph. The Bluffs does not need the help. The golf stands up on a calm, gray day when the lake looks like steel and nobody is taking pictures.

The concession, and it is a real one: the design crowd has a point about the South Course. The Bluffs is a modern resort design, spectacular and playable in the contemporary manner, and purists who prize strategy, templates and the golden age will tell you the more interesting golf at this property is a mile inland. They are not wrong about interesting. We rank courses, though, on the full account: golf, day, setting, the whole experience. On that account the bluff and the lake are unbeatable, and the Bluffs takes the title in its own town.

2Arcadia Bluffs South Course

The South Course is Dana Fry's tribute to Macdonald and Raynor, which means golf built from the template school: geometric shapes, bold engineered features, holes that quote the golden age's greatest hits in a Michigan accent. This is catnip to architecture golfers, the ones who plan trips around designers the way wine people plan around vineyards, and the South is the reason Arcadia gets two days from them instead of one. They come for the lake. They stay arguing for the South.

It finishes second for one reason only: it is inland, and its sibling is 180 feet over Lake Michigan. That is not a design criticism. It is geography, and geography this extreme decides rankings. On architecture alone, on the purity of the golfing questions, the South has a legitimate claim to first, and we suspect that in fifty years, when the panel dust settles, the gap in reputation between these two courses will be smaller than it is today, maybe reversed among the design faithful.

Concede also the practical point in its favor: the South often delivers the better pure golf day, freed from the bluff's exposure and the photo stop traffic of a famous course. If your group is serious players who care about the test and nothing else, book the South first and the Bluffs for the sunset round, and you will have played this town in the connoisseur's order.

Arcadia's real verdict is that a village this small holding this argument is absurd and wonderful. Two destination courses, one crowned by a lake, one by a century old design philosophy, and a main street that goes quiet after dinner while golfers at the lodge keep the fight going. Play both, pick your side, and understand that the argument itself is the best thing Arcadia sells.