# The Best Golf Courses in Fairbanks

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-fairbanks-ak/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Alaska


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

Fairbanks golf exists at the extremes. The Interior winter takes the courses away for most of the year, and the summer answers with light that barely leaves, golf around the solstice played in a kind of permanent evening. The town's golf calendar has a centerpiece built on exactly that: a tournament timed to the longest days, when a round can start late and finish in light that never fully gave up.

This is a three-course town, and the ranking is honest about what that means. There is no deep bench to argue over. There is a club that anchors the town's golf life, a military course that civilians can play, and a public option carrying the best name in Alaskan golf. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in Fairbanks access has a way of rearranging the order for any given golfer.

Understand the season before judging the golf. Interior courses get a fraction of the playing year that courses in the Lower 48 take for granted, and conditioning in Fairbanks is a fight against the calendar as much as against the weather on any given day. A green that comes through the winter well is an achievement here. The golfers are hardier for it, the leagues fuller, the appreciation for an ordinary good evening on the course noticeably stronger than in towns where golf is available in February.

## 1Fairbanks Golf and Country Club

The club hosts the Midnight Sun Golf Classic around the solstice, and that fact settles the top of this list. A course that a town builds its signature golf event around is a course that has earned the local verdict already. The Classic is the idea of Fairbanks golf distilled: competition under a sun that will not set, in the short bright window the whole season leans toward. The club underneath the event is the town's established golf institution, the place with the deepest roots in the local game and the fullest calendar.

The concession: this is a club, and club golf always carries a door that not everyone walks through. A visitor with one free day and no connections may find the next course on this list is the round actually available to him. But rankings judge the golf and the place it holds in its town, and in Fairbanks nothing holds more of either.

## 2Chena Bend Golf Course

Chena Bend is the Fort Wainwright course, and it is open to civilians, which makes it the most interesting access story in Interior Alaska: a military golf course that a visiting golfer can genuinely plan a trip around. The name gives away the ground. The course works the bend of the river country outside town, flat Interior terrain where the golf has to be made by the layout rather than the land, and by most local accounts the test holds up well against anything in the region.

The knock is the one every base course carries. Getting on means playing by the installation's rules, on the installation's schedule, and a civilian round can be bumped by the needs of the place. That friction keeps it second. The golf itself, golfers who have played both will tell you, has a real argument for first, and if the Classic did not exist this list might read differently.

## 3Midnight Sun Golf Course

The name is perfect, which is part of the problem. Midnight Sun Golf Course promises the solstice fantasy in four words, and the golf, while perfectly serviceable public golf, is the third-best test in a three-course town. What it offers instead is simplicity: no club door, no base gate, just public golf under the same enormous summer sky as everything else in Fairbanks.

That counts for something. For a traveler passing through the Interior with clubs in the trunk, this may be the easiest yes on the list, and an easy yes at 10 p.m. in June is a fine thing. It finishes third on the golf and would finish first on convenience, and both of those facts belong in the record.

Somewhere near the solstice, the last group at the club plays the closing holes in light the color of late afternoon. The sun dips, thinks about it, and comes back up. So does everyone else, for as many weeks as the summer gives them.

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