# The Best Golf Courses in El Paso

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-el-paso-tx/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Texas


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Golf in El Paso is played in the shadow of a mountain range that cuts the city in two, in light so clear it seems to add a club to every shot, with Mexico visible from the high ground and the desert pressing against every fairway's edge. A Tom Fazio course by the airport is the city's modern calling card, and a desert design from 1991 on the northeast side is the older statement. Between them sit a traditional country club and a county course, and that foursome is the serious golf of the westernmost city in Texas.

Four courses, four different answers to the same desert. This ranking scores the golf first, then the day, then access, and El Paso's list has a pleasant balance the private club towns cannot offer: half of it is public, and the public half includes both of the city's signature desert designs. A visitor can play the top two arguments in this ranking without knowing a soul in El Paso. That is rarer than it should be.

## 1Butterfield Trail Golf Club

Butterfield Trail is Tom Fazio by the airport, and it earns No. 1 as the most polished desert golf in the city. Fazio in the desert means the full production: fairways carved through the native ground, the desert kept close enough to punish the crooked ball and frame every hole for the photograph, conditioning that holds up in a climate trying to dry the course back to sand. The name reaches back to the old stagecoach route through the pass, and the course plays with that sense of being built along a corridor through hard country.

The concession is price and personality. Butterfield Trail charges like a premium public course, because it is one, and a share of golfers find Fazio's polish a little too managed, the desert arranged rather than encountered. Fair. Ranked against Painted Dunes below, it is the better funded, better finished version of desert golf in El Paso. Ranked against the whole city, it is the course a visitor should play if they can only play one, and rankings are allowed to say the obvious thing when the obvious thing is true.

## 2Painted Dunes Desert Golf Course

Painted Dunes is Ken Dye desert golf from 1991, and it is the connoisseur's pick in El Paso, the course locals argue for when the Fazio name wins too easily. Dye, from the family that made desert target golf famous, built a rawer version of the game here on the northeast side: the desert is less landscaped, the targets are more honestly framed by what was already there, and the wind off the Franklins gets a cleaner shot at your ball.

We rank it second in a decision that could flip on budget. Painted Dunes costs notably less of your money and asks many of the same questions, and on architecture per dollar it wins this list outright. What it cannot match is the finish. Butterfield Trail's conditioning and presentation sit a level above, and a ranking that scores the full day as well as the design has to count that. Second by polish, first by value, and the best argument in El Paso golf: two public desert courses good enough to argue about at all.

## 3El Paso Country Club

El Paso Country Club is the traditional entry, the old club on the west side where the city's golf was played in its classic form, parkland habits imported to the desert and maintained against the climate by membership money and long habit. The course offers the traditionalist's round: tree lined where the desert courses are open, society and continuity where they offer scenery, a club that has anchored El Paso golf society for generations.

It ranks third because the desert courses own this city's golfing identity now, and a ranking should admit when the center of gravity has moved. The club's members play a more comfortable, more familiar game, and some of them would not trade their shaded fairways for either public course's sand and rock. That preference is coherent. It is just no longer where the best golf in El Paso is being played, and the list has to reflect the golf.

## 4Ascarate Golf Course

Ascarate is the county course, set in the big county park by the lake, and it closes this list as the people's golf of El Paso: cheap, busy, unpretentious, the course where the city's public game actually lives day to day. County golf runs on a county budget, and Ascarate shows it in the surfaces the way every course of its kind does. What it also shows is a full tee sheet, which is its own form of evidence.

Fourth is the right place and no disgrace. Ascarate's role is to keep El Paso golfing, to give the beginner and the budget player and the after work nine a home, and it has done that job within sight of the mountains for longer than the fancy desert courses have existed. A ranking that only honored the top of a town's golf would miss the base that holds the whole game up.

Evening in El Paso turns the Franklins the color the second course on this list is named for, and the last groups come in off the desert courses and the county fairways alike, everyone playing the same long light. The desert was here first. These four courses are just its most civilized arguments.

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