Town Rankings / Wisconsin

The Best Golf Courses in Ephraim

Ephraim is a white-steepled village on the Door Peninsula where the bay side of the county does its quiet, pretty best to slow you down. Sailboats, ice cream, sunsets over Green Bay. And inside the state park just north of the village, a golf course that has been there since 1917, which makes it older than most of the traditions the peninsula sells to its summer visitors.

An honest note on the map before we rank anything. Ephraim itself has the one course, inside Peninsula State Park. The rest of this list borrows from the neighbors, Egg Harbor to the south and Sturgeon Bay further down the peninsula, because that is how a golf day actually works up here. You stay in Ephraim, you play the park course, and then you drive a few minutes for the next round. Three courses, all public, all priced for vacation golf rather than event golf. This is a ranking about a good week at the lake as much as about architecture, and we will rank it that way without pretending Door County is something it is not.

1Peninsula State Park Golf Course

A course inside a state park, playing since 1917, with Eagle Bluff views from the 17th tee. That tee shot late in the round, standing up on the bluff with the bay spread out below, is the single moment Door County golf is remembered by, and it arrives at exactly the right point in the round to feel earned.

The rest of the course is honest park golf: tree-lined, walkable, routed through the woods of the park rather than along the water, which surprises first-timers who expect eighteen holes of shoreline. The water is a presence and a payoff, not a constant companion. The golf itself is a friendly test with a couple of genuinely demanding holes, kept to a public standard, priced so a family can play it without a family meeting.

The concession is that a state park course answers to a park's priorities, not a golfer's. Conditioning will trail a dedicated resort course, the layout is more pleasant than strategic, and serious players will finish the round admiring the setting more than any single hole besides the bluff holes at the end.

It still wins this list easily, and not only on the view. A century of golf inside a beloved park, at public prices, with the best finishing stretch on the peninsula. Peninsula is the round you plan the Ephraim trip around, and the one you will describe when somebody asks whether the golf up there is worth packing the clubs for. It is.

2The Orchards at Egg Harbor Golf Course

Down the road in Egg Harbor, the Orchards gives Door County its modern public option: a fuller, more conventionally designed test than the park course, built through the orchard country the name describes, the kind of course a stronger player picks when the trip needs one round with real teeth in it.

We put it second on the golf. Hole for hole it may ask more questions than Peninsula does. What it cannot do is be Peninsula. It has no bluff, no 1917, no state park around it, and in a ranking that counts the day as well as the design, that setting gap is decisive in Door County, where the setting is half the reason anybody drove up the peninsula.

The concession for the Orchards is that it competes in a category, modern public golf, where the comparisons are state-wide and unforgiving. Judged as a vacation course on the peninsula, it is a strong second round. Judged against Wisconsin's best publics, it is out of its league, and so is everything else on this list. Play it as the serious round of an Ephraim week and it will do its job well.

3Idlewild Golf Course (Sturgeon Bay)

Idlewild, down in Sturgeon Bay, is the locals' course of the three, the everyday public round for the county's year-round golfers, and it finishes third here without shame. It is the furthest drive from Ephraim, the least scenic of the list, and the most purely functional: good value, a full test of ordinary golf, a parking lot full of local plates.

The concession is simply that nothing about Idlewild reaches for more than that. No bluff, no orchard theme, no century of park history. It is a county workhorse and it plays like one.

But workhorses close lists like this all over the Midwest, and they earn their spot the same way. When the summer crowds have the park course booked solid, Idlewild is the round a smart visitor finds. Third in Ephraim's borrowed ranking, first in line when the first choice is full, and a fair picture of what golf looks like on the peninsula once the tourists go home.