# The Best Golf Courses in Bismarck

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-bismarck-nd/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / North Dakota


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

The bunkers at Hawktree are black. Not dark, not brownish. Black, filled with coal sand, sitting in the folds of the Missouri River hills west of Bismarck like scorch marks on pale ground. It is the single most recognisable visual in North Dakota golf, and it belongs to a public course in a state capital of modest size, which tells you something about how golf works out here. The best of it is spread thin, and the good courses work hard for their character.

Bismarck's bench is three courses deep: one modern design with a national reputation, and two public workhorses, one in the city and one across the river in Mandan. That is the whole list and we will not pretend otherwise. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in a town where everything on the list is public, access settles nothing. The golf has to do the talking.

## 1Hawktree Golf Club

Jim Engh designed Hawktree, and Engh has never been interested in polite golf. His courses move, and this one moves through river hills with the black coal-sand bunkers as the signature: a local material turned into a design idea, which is the oldest trick in good architecture and still the best one. Golfweek ranks Hawktree the best public course in North Dakota, and that verdict has held up because the course backs the photograph with substance, elevation change and variety that flat prairie golf simply cannot offer.

The concession is that Engh's style splits a room. His shaping is bold to the point of theatre in places, and golfers raised on restraint sometimes find Hawktree loud. Fair enough. But in a state where the honest criticism of most courses is sameness, loud and memorable beats quiet and forgettable. Hawktree is the course North Dakota sends pictures of, and unlike most courses that get photographed, it survives the visit.

## 2Riverwood Golf Course

Riverwood is Bismarck's own: the city course, mature, tree-lined in the way prairie courses plant trees for fifty years until the wind finally gives up, and the round local golfers have played more than any other. Courses like this are the actual infrastructure of the game in the northern plains. They take the juniors, the leagues, the after-work nine, and the serious Saturday match, all on the same ground.

Nobody will confuse Riverwood's architecture with Hawktree's, and that is the concession and the ranking in one line. It is a good municipal course rather than a destination, and its pleasures are familiarity and fairness rather than drama. But a capital city needs exactly this course, kept playable for everybody, and Bismarck's version does the job well enough to hold second on a short bench without apology.

## 3Prairie West Golf Course (Mandan)

Cross the Missouri to Mandan and Prairie West is the west bank's answer, another public course serving the other half of the metro. It is honest prairie golf: open to the sky, exposed to whatever the wind is doing that day, and priced and run for the people who live there. On a calm morning it is a pleasant walk. On a windy afternoon, which is most afternoons, it asks you to flight the ball down and accept what the ground gives you, which is a real golf skill that sheltered courses never teach.

It ranks third because the other two simply have more: Hawktree has the design and the land, Riverwood has the maturity and the city's weight behind it. Prairie West's case is access and candour. It does not pretend to be anything but Mandan's public course, and as a third option in a two-city metro on the high plains, it fills the bench out honourably. Play Hawktree for the memory, Riverwood for the routine, and Prairie West when the wind is up and you want to find out what your ball flight is actually made of.

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