Town Rankings / Montana
The Best Golf Courses in Billings
Billings is Montana's working city, rimrocks and refineries, and its golf has the same unadorned character. Three courses make the list: a club from 1923 up in the Heights, a semi-private test on the south side, and a public option that rounds out the rotation. Nobody is flying to Billings for a golf trip, and Billings golfers would find the idea funny. This is golf for the people who live under the rims, ranked the way we rank everywhere: the golf first, then the day, then access.
What Billings offers that coastal golf towns do not is space and wind. Eastern Montana golf is played under a very large sky, on ground that does not pretend to be something else, in conditions that change between the parking lot and the third tee. The ranking rewards the course that has made the most of that over the longest time.
1Hilands Golf Club
Hilands dates to 1923, in the Heights above the city, and a century of continuous golf is a credential no newer course can argue with. Clubs that survive a hundred years in a city like Billings do it by being woven into the place: generations of members, the same families on the tee sheet, a course that has been tinkered with and argued over and kept. That accumulated local knowledge is a form of quality rankings underrate, because it cannot be photographed. You feel it by the fifth hole.
The Heights setting gives Hilands the best ground in this ranking, elevated and open to the weather that defines golf out here. Old courses on good ground age into their strategy. The trees fill in, the lines off the tee clarify, and what remains is a test that asks local questions. Visiting players shoot visiting scores. Members nod.
The concession: a 1923 club is private, and its charms are partly the charms of belonging, which a ranking can acknowledge but a visitor cannot rent. We rank it first on the golf and the ground and the hundred years, while noting that first place in Billings, as in most American cities, sits behind a membership door.
2The Briarwood Golf Club
Briarwood is the semi-private test on Billings's south side, and semi-private is the useful category in a city like this. Members get their club. The public gets a way in. Briarwood's standing in the local game rests on being the sterner examination among the courses a non-member can realistically arrange, the place better players in Billings point to when the conversation turns to which course actually tests you.
That is a narrower claim than Hilands makes, and it lands Briarwood second. The architecture conversation in eastern Montana is a short one, and neither course here is in it; what separates them is history, ground, and the depth of the membership culture at the older club. Briarwood's counteroffer is access with standards, a real test that takes outside play. For most readers, that makes it the most useful course on this list. Usefulness finishes second to the best golf, by our rubric and by our choice.
3Lake Hills Golf Club
Lake Hills completes the Billings rotation as the public workhorse, the course that absorbs the volume the other two cannot or will not. Every golf city has one, and the type is easy to patronize and wrong to dismiss. Public golf at Lake Hills prices is what keeps the game a mass sport in Montana rather than a members' hobby, and the course carries that duty for the whole city.
On pure golf it sits third, and we will not pretend the conditioning or the test matches the club golf above it. Budgets are budgets. But a ranking of Billings golf that ended at two private-adjacent courses would misdescribe the city, where plenty of good golfers learned the game at Lake Hills and still play there on the weeks the wind off the rims makes every course in town play two clubs longer anyway.
Evening comes down off the rimrocks and the last groups at all three courses are playing into the same big light. Billings golf is not fancy. It has also been going since 1923, which is its own kind of fancy.