# The Best Golf Courses in Duluth

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Minnesota


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

Duluth is built on a hill above the biggest lake in the world, and everything in the city, including the golf, negotiates with the slope and the water. The streets climb. The views open without warning. A round here comes with Lake Superior in the frame and lake weather in the forecast, cold air off the water in June, light that belongs to a seaport rather than the Midwest. Three courses make the list: a private club with a famous architect's name on it, and two city courses that divide Duluth's public golf between them.

The order is not mysterious, but the reasons are worth stating, because Duluth's list is really an argument about what survives in northern golf. Pedigree survives at the top. Place survives in the middle. The bottom course survives on loyalty, which is a real currency in a city this size, just not one this ranking spends. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in Duluth the day keeps trying to outvote the golf, because the day, up on that hill, is very good.

## 1Northland Country Club

Northland is Donald Ross above Lake Superior, and the combination explains itself to anyone who has played Ross's work or seen that lake. Ross built courses that ask for thought over force, greens with opinions, holes that unfold at walking pace. Set that mind on Duluth's hillside, with Superior spread out below, and you get the finest golf in the northeastern quarter of Minnesota: a private club whose architecture and setting reinforce each other instead of competing for the credit.

The concession is the familiar private one, with a northern twist. Northland is members' golf, so most golfers reading a Duluth list will never play it, and its season is the lake's season, short and defended by weather on both ends. Neither fact dents the ranking. Ross on a hill above Superior is the strongest hand any course in this region can hold, and Northland holds it. First place, and the gap to second is the widest on this list relative to the town's size.

## 2Enger Park Golf Course

Enger Park is Duluth's public answer, a city course up on the hill where the views do the heavy lifting. The honest summary, known to everyone who plays it, is that Enger Park's views from the hill beat its conditioning every time. The lake, the harbor, the city stacked below: the setting is first-class and the upkeep is municipal, and a golfer can hold both truths in one round without much effort. On a clear day, the disconnect barely matters. The course sells the best cheap view in Minnesota golf and throws the golf in with it.

The concession is the conditioning, since we have already said it out loud, plus a ceiling on the architecture that no view can raise. Enger Park is not a test that travels. Nobody plans a trip around its greens. But as a public course in a small northern city, it delivers the one thing Duluth golf promises, a round played in full sight of Superior, and it delivers it to anyone with a tee time. Second place, comfortably, on the strength of place.

## 3Lester Park Golf Course

Lester Park is the city's other public course, out on the east side where Duluth stretches along the shore, and its golf is the local game in its plainest form: affordable, unpretentious, and woven into the routines of the golfers who live near it. Courses like Lester Park are the load-bearing walls of American golf, the places where a town's players actually play, week after week, in numbers no private club can match.

Third place is where that argument lands on a list that scores design and setting first, because Lester Park concedes both to the courses above it: no Ross, no hilltop panorama, no single feature a stranger would repeat. What it keeps is its people. Duluth's list closes with the lake going dark beyond the east end of the city and the last public golfers of the day walking in, already arguing about tomorrow's tee time.

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