# The Best Golf Courses in Biwabik

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-biwabik-mn/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Minnesota


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

Biwabik is iron country. The Mesabi Range dug Minnesota's wealth out of the ground here for a century, and the town's famous golf course went back into one of the holes the digging left behind. The Quarry at Giants Ridge is golf routed through an old iron mine, and in winter the same property turns back into a ski hill, which tells you most of what you need to know about the terrain and the season. This is the far edge of Minnesota golf, up near the Canadian border's weather if not quite its latitude, and it has exactly two courses. They share a lodge, a parking lot, and a lift line's worth of elevation.

A two-course list in a town this small should be a formality. It is not quite, because the second course was famous first and the first course's claim needs stating carefully. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. On golf, the mine beats the mountain's older sibling, and the margin is the whole point of driving to Biwabik.

## 1The Quarry at Giants Ridge

The Quarry is Jeff Brauer working in an old iron mine, and it was Golf Digest's former No. 1 public course in Minnesota. Sit with the strangeness of that for a moment. A state with serious public golf, including resort courses with national profiles, had its top public spot held by a course in a worked-out mine in Biwabik. The ranking was not sentiment. Quarry golf gives a designer shots and settings that flat farmland Minnesota cannot: holes dropping and climbing through the excavation, rock and water where the pit left them, a round that keeps changing altitude and mood.

Brauer used the mine rather than decorating it, which is the difference between a theme and a golf course. The concession is the setting's own severity. Pit golf means trouble with real consequences, carries and drops that a higher handicapper experiences as a long walk between lost balls, and the northern season is short enough that the course spends much of the year as a rumor under snow. Golfers who want their resort round friendly will not find the Quarry friendly.

First place is still not a debate. The Quarry is the reason Giants Ridge is a destination rather than a ski hill with a summer hobby, and it is the strongest argument in Minnesota that a scarred landscape, handled by a good architect, beats a pretty one handled politely.

## 2The Legend at Giants Ridge

The Legend came first at Giants Ridge and carried the resort's golf reputation before the Quarry existed, a big northern course through the woods and over the hills that taught Minnesota golfers this property was serious. It remains a substantial round: elevation, forest, the ski mountain's shoulder as a backdrop, and enough golf to fill a day without apology. On a two-course trip, the Legend is the round that plays the straight man, and it plays it well.

Its concession is written into its name's bad luck. The Legend is now the second course at its own resort, second in its own town, and second in every conversation about Biwabik golf, because its sibling took the mine and the national ranking with it. That is not a failure of the golf. It is a failure of real estate. There was only one iron mine to build in.

So Biwabik's list is short and its verdict is easy, which suits a town that has never had much use for decoration. Dig the ore out, flood the pit, route the fairways through what is left, and let the skiers have it back in November. The last light on the range catches the mine walls first, and the golf, for a few months a year, is better than the state had any right to expect from a hole in the ground.

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