Town Rankings / New Hampshire

The Best Golf Courses in Bretton Woods

The grand hotel at Bretton Woods is where the Bretton Woods Conference happened, the meeting that built the postwar monetary order, and below it sits a Donald Ross golf course from 1915, restored by Brian Silva, facing Mount Washington. Golf has a lot of historic hotels. It has very few where the history is that large and the golf, a genuine Ross, is not an afterthought but the other reason to come. The mountain does the rest. Mount Washington is the tallest, roughest-weather peak in the Northeast, and it fills the window of every view on the property.

Two courses make this list, the resort's Ross and a village course over in Bethlehem. It is a short bench in a short-season mountain valley, and we will treat it that way: honestly, and without inflating either entry. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. In the White Mountains, the setting keeps trying to outvote the golf, and part of the interest here is watching that fight.

1Mount Washington Resort Golf Course

Ross laid this course out in 1915, in the era when he was building the architecture that still defines New England golf, and Brian Silva's restoration brought the Ross character back to the front of the property: the bunkering, the green complexes, the sense of a course designed by a man rather than drawn by a committee. Resort golf usually sands a classic design down to a postcard. This one did the opposite and recovered a real course under a famous hotel, with the Presidential Range standing over the whole round.

The concession is the resort frame itself. You play it as a guest, at resort pace and resort prices, in a season the mountain can shorten whenever it feels like it, and the hotel's fame means the golf sometimes gets treated as an amenity by the people selling it. Ignore the sales pitch. The golf is a 1915 Ross, restored with respect, in the most dramatic mountain setting in New Hampshire. First place is straightforward.

The mountain also deserves a word as a playing condition, not just a view. Mount Washington is famous for violent weather, the peak where a wind gust of 231 miles an hour was recorded in 1934, a world mark that stood for decades. The golf sits far below the summit and nobody is teeing off in that, but the mountain makes its own climate in the valley: mornings that start cold in July, cloud that builds over the range by afternoon, and light that changes the look of a hole between the outward and homeward nines. A round here is scheduled around a mountain's mood, and golfers who treat it as ordinary resort golf in front of a big hill get corrected by the sky, usually before the turn.

2Maplewood Golf Course (Bethlehem)

Maplewood, over in Bethlehem, is the local answer to the resort: a village course in a White Mountains town that has been hosting summer visitors since the grand hotel era, quieter, smaller in scale, and woven into the community rather than presented by a resort. Golf here is the unhurried kind, a round in the hills without the production, the tee times, or the terrace.

It takes second because the Ross across the valley is a major work by a major architect with a restoration behind it, and that gap is real. But Maplewood's virtues are the ones resort golf cannot sell you: simplicity, price, and the feeling of a course that belongs to its town. Golfers staying a week in the valley should play the Ross for the record and Maplewood for the pleasure, and may find, driving home past the big hotel with the mountain going dark behind it, that the week gave them more of the second than the first.