# The Best Golf Courses in Farmington, New Mexico

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-farmington-nm/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / New Mexico


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

Farmington is a working town in the Four Corners, oil and gas country, the kind of place where a great municipal golf course sounds like a rumor somebody brought back from a road trip. It is not a rumor. The best course in this ranking was once rated the best municipal in America under fifty dollars, and people who have played golf all over the Southwest will still bring up its name unprompted, usually with some disbelief that a city course in Farmington did this.

Candor first: this is a two course town. That is the whole bench. We are not going to invent a third name to make the list look fuller, and we are not going to stretch two courses into a destination guide. Farmington golf is one excellent reason to stop, plus a small local course that serves the town in a different way. Ranked honestly, that is plenty to write about, because the top course is genuinely that good.

## 1Pinon Hills Golf Course

Pinon Hills is a Ken Dye design, built by the city, and Golf Digest once ranked it America's best municipal course under $50. Sit with that for a second. Not best in New Mexico. Not best value in the region. Best municipal under fifty dollars in the country, in a town most golfers could not find on a map before they heard the course's name.

The reason is the land and what Dye did with it. Farmington sits in high desert cut by arroyos and rimrock, and Pinon Hills uses that broken ground instead of flattening it into submission. Fairways run along the natural contours, trouble is the desert itself rather than trouble trucked in and planted, and the round keeps changing character as the ground rises and falls. It feels discovered more than built, which is the highest compliment desert golf can earn.

The concession, and it matters, is that a famous value course carries famous value expectations. Golfers arrive expecting the conditioning and polish of a resort track because the reputation got there before the green fee did. Pinon Hills is a municipal course with a municipal budget. Conditions vary with the season and the water, and the facilities are a city's facilities. Players who understand what they are paying for leave delighted. Players who expected a resort leave confused, and the confusion is on them.

There is also the simple fact of where it is. Farmington is a drive from almost everywhere, which has protected Pinon Hills from the fate of other celebrated munis that got loved into six hour rounds and tripled fees. It remains what it was built to be: a city's course that happens to be better than most private clubs' guests courses. If you are crossing the Four Corners for one round, this is the round, and it is not a close call.

## 2Civitan Golf Course

Civitan is the small course, the local one, the place Farmington golfers go when the day does not have five hours in it. Courses like this rarely make rankings because rankings reward scale, and scale is not the point here. The point is access in the truest sense: cheap, close, unintimidating golf for juniors, beginners, seniors, and anyone working on a swing that is not ready for Pinon Hills and its desert carries.

Ranking it second is technically accurate and slightly unfair to it, because it is not trying to be a smaller Pinon Hills. It is trying to be the town's practice ground and front porch, and by that measure it succeeds at a job the famous course cannot do. Pinon Hills cannot be where a ten year old plays her first holes. Civitan can.

The honest gap between the two is enormous, and pretending otherwise would insult both. One is a nationally known design. The other is a neighborhood golf course. But a town's golf is the sum of both, and Farmington, improbably, has the pair covered: a course people drive hours to play, and a course the people who live there actually learn on. Most bigger towns cannot say the first half of that sentence. Farmington says it and then goes back to work.

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