Town Rankings / Idaho
The Best Golf Courses in Coeur d'Alene
Everybody who knows one thing about Coeur d'Alene golf knows the floating green. A par 3 to a movable island in the lake, a boat taxi to putt out, a photograph that has sold more resort rooms than any advertising the state of Idaho has ever bought. The interesting question for a ranking is what sits underneath the photograph, because a town cannot be ranked on a single hole, even that one.
The honest answer is that this is a resort town with a real bench. The anchors reach up the lake country into Post Falls and toward Sandpoint, and the golf splits cleanly: one famous resort course, one serious private design in the woods, one public course that does the local work. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and here the day keeps trying to outvote the golf, because the setting, a deep blue lake under pine covered mountains, is the best in Idaho.
1Coeur d'Alene Resort Golf Course
The resort course gets criticized for the floating green, as if a hole people remember for thirty years were a defect. The criticism misses what the rest of the course is: a polished, heavily manicured resort test on the shore of the lake, with forecaddies, immaculate conditioning, and service run like a good hotel, because it is one. The island hole is the famous member of a strong family. The course asks resort questions, mostly about accuracy and nerve around water, and it asks them in the most dramatic classroom in the state.
The concession is price and philosophy. This is manufactured golf, every blade accounted for, and golfers who prefer their courses found rather than built will find the whole production too much. It is also the most expensive public round in this part of Idaho by a wide margin. We rank it first anyway, because the full day here, the golf plus the lake plus the machinery of the place working exactly as designed, is the biggest golf experience in the Idaho Panhandle, and the floating green, hit once in your life, is worth the boat ride.
2The Idaho Club (Sandpoint area)
The Idaho Club, up toward Sandpoint, is the purist's answer and the strongest pure design on this list. It is a Jack Nicklaus course through forest and wetlands along the Pack River, private, quiet, and built for golfers who think a resort course with a boat taxi is a circus. On architecture alone, on the strength of the routing and the examination it sets, there is a real case that this is No. 1 and the resort is a very good hotel with a golf course attached.
We put it second on the day and on consequence. The Idaho Club is a members' retreat that most golfers will never see, in a town ranking that has to weigh what a place means to golf in the area, not only what it means to the hundred families who belong to it. The concession cuts both ways, and we will make it plainly: if you get one invitation in the Panhandle and it is here, take it over everything else on this list.
3Highlands Golf Course (Post Falls)
Highlands is the public course in Post Falls that keeps this from being a two course argument between a resort and a private club. It is where local golfers actually play, in the hills above the Spokane River country, at a price that allows golf to be a weekly habit instead of a vacation line item. Every resort town needs one of these and most hide it. Coeur d'Alene's is close, public, and proud of the role.
Third is the ceiling and the floor at once. Highlands cannot match the conditioning of the resort or the design pedigree up at Sandpoint, and it does not pretend to. What it can do is be played, this week, by anybody reading this, which neither course above it can honestly promise.
The boat taxi still gets the photograph. But the Panhandle works because the photograph is only the top of the list, and underneath it there is a Nicklaus in the pines and a public course in the hills holding up the local game.