Town Rankings / Idaho

The Best Golf Courses in Boise

Boise golf starts with the foothills. The city sits where the high desert runs into the mountains, the light is dry and hard, and the two city courses climb into that brown, open ground north of downtown. It is not lush golf and does not try to be. It is cheap, public in spirit even at the private clubs by coastal standards, and playable for more of the year than a mountain state has any right to expect.

The bench is four deep: two private clubs and two city courses, and the split tells the story of the town. Boise grew fast, but its golf stayed local. Nothing on this list was built to impress a national panel. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and value does real work here, because a ranking of Boise that ignored what a round costs would miss the point of Boise.

1Hillcrest Country Club Boise

Hillcrest is the city's championship address. For years the club hosted the Boise stop on what is now the Korn Ferry Tour, the event that became the Albertsons Boise Open, which means tour level fields came to Idaho every fall and played a members' course in the foothills. A club course that can hold a professional field without embarrassing itself is playing a different game from the rest of this list, and Hillcrest did it as an annual routine rather than a one off experiment.

The concession is the usual private one, sharpened by Boise's public value. When the city courses down the list charge what they charge, paying private money in Boise needs the golf to justify it, and a skeptic could argue the gap between Hillcrest and the publics is narrower here than in almost any other state capital. Narrower, yes. Closed, no. The tournament record is the tiebreaker and it is not really a tie.

2Crane Creek Country Club

Crane Creek is the other private option, set in the foothills on the east side of the city, and it makes the simpler case: a strong members' course, a committed membership, and a setting that uses the desert hills rather than hiding from them. If Hillcrest is the club that proved itself in public, Crane Creek is the club that never needed to. Its members would tell you the ranking has the top two backwards.

They have a partial point, and we will concede it. Judged only on the day, on conditioning and on how the course sits in its ground, the argument between the two clubs is a genuine argument. Judged on evidence, on what a course has been asked to do and done, Hillcrest has the receipt and Crane Creek does not. Second here is a ranking most Idaho towns would build a brochure around.

3Quail Hollow Golf Course Boise

Quail Hollow is the best public golf in Boise, a city course that climbs into the foothills and plays with more elevation and more nerve than municipal golf usually attempts. This is the round we would send a visiting golfer to without hesitation. It shows you the landscape the whole list is about, the dry hills and the long views, and it charges a city price for the privilege.

The concession is conditioning and consistency, the standing municipal trade. Quail Hollow cannot hold its surfaces to a private standard on a public budget, and in a dry climate that shows by August. What it gives back is access and terrain. A public golfer in Boise gets foothill golf as a birthright. In most American cities that sentence is false.

4Warm Springs Golf Course

Warm Springs is the other city course, the flatter, older, easier going sibling, set along the river side of town where the geothermal water that heats half the old neighborhood gives the course its name. It is the league course, the after work nine, the place beginners in Boise become golfers. Rankings like this one undervalue that role on purpose. Somebody has to finish fourth.

And fourth here still means a full length city course, open all year in the loose Idaho sense of the term, at a price that keeps golf a habit instead of an occasion. Warm Springs loses on the golf and wins on the calendar, and there are weeks in February, with the foothills brown and the river running cold, when that trade looks like the whole list turned upside down.