# The Best Golf Courses in Big Sky

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-big-sky-mt/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Montana


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

Big Sky is a ski town that learned to sell summer. The golf splits cleanly into two altitudes and two worlds. Down in the meadow sits a public Arnold Palmer course that anyone can book. Above it, on the mountain, are the private ski-club courses, Spanish Peaks and Moonlight Basin, where golf is an amenity of membership in a world most visitors only see from the lift line. A ranking here is partly about golf and partly about which of those worlds you are allowed into. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and we will be honest when access does the ranking for us.

The season is short, the air is thin, the ball flies forever, and every course in town plays in the shadow of Lone Peak. That much is common ground. The order is not.

## 1Moonlight Basin Golf Course

Moonlight Basin takes the top spot on the strength of the total proposition at altitude: a private mountain course at a ski area that already had the terrain, the views, and the membership model, and built golf to match the ambition of the rest of the place. Mountain golf at this level is a specific pleasure. Holes climb and fall with the land, the thin air adds a club or two of carry, and the backdrop does half the visual work before a single bunker is placed.

The honest concession is that almost nobody reading this will play it. Moonlight is a members' world, attached to one of the most exclusive addresses in Montana skiing, and ranking it first is a judgment about the golf and the setting, not a recommendation you can act on this weekend. Rankings that quietly drop private courses to avoid that awkwardness end up useless. The best course in Big Sky is private. There it is.

## 2Spanish Peaks Mountain Club Golf Course

Spanish Peaks is the other private ski-club course, and the argument between it and Moonlight is the argument Big Sky members have with each other, which is to say it is a good problem in an expensive neighborhood. Spanish Peaks plays the mountain golf brief its own way, with the same altitude, the same short season, and the same Lone Peak presence that no architect can take credit for and every architect here gets to use.

We put it second by a nose, on the overall weight of the Moonlight package rather than on any failure at Spanish Peaks. Swap the order and you have a defensible list. What is not defensible is pretending either of these courses competes with the public option on any terms except the view. They are playing a different sport financially, and the golf reflects the budget. Second here would be first in nearly any other Montana town on this site.

## 3Big Sky Golf Course

And then there is the course you can actually play. Big Sky Golf Course is a public Arnold Palmer design in the meadow, and Palmer in a meadow is a particular kind of golf: playable, scenic in the valley-floor way, built for the resort guest who wants a good round rather than a story of survival. It is the working golf course of Big Sky, the one that takes tee times from the public all summer.

Ranked third on golf, it is first on the only list a visitor can use, and the two truths should both be printed. The meadow setting gives up the drama of the mountain courses, and the design brief was hospitality rather than examination. But when the private gates stay closed, and they will, this is Big Sky golf for the rest of us: a Palmer course under a very large peak, at an altitude that flatters every drive you hit. There are worse consolations in American golf.

The lifts stop, the snow leaves the meadow first, and the public course opens while the mountain clubs are still digging out. In Big Sky, the season belongs to whoever gets grass first, and that is never the private money up top.

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