# The Best Golf Courses in Gearhart

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-gearhart-or/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Oregon


A leading golf course in Oregon. Photo: Visitor7, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Gearhart makes a claim most American golf towns cannot: golf here goes back to 1892, which puts it among the oldest golf ground west of the Mississippi. This is the north Oregon coast, where the wind comes off the Pacific without asking, the grass is fescue and bent in the old style, and a round is something the weather co-authors whether you invited it or not.

The bench is short and honest. One historic links in town, one modest course in Seaside, and one private club up the coast at Astoria that locals count as part of the same small golf world. We rank the golf first, and in Gearhart that means asking which course uses the wind and the dunes instead of merely surviving them.

## 1Gearhart Golf Links

Gearhart Golf Links is the reason this list exists. The 1892 roots are real, even if the course golfers play today is the product of more than a century of changes, and the important thing is what the age produced: a true links on sandy ground a few blocks from the ocean, public, walkable, and stubbornly uninterested in becoming a resort course. Fairways ripple. Greens sit close to the ground. The wind is not a hazard on the card, it is the design.

Modern work has sharpened rather than softened it, and the result is the rarest thing in American golf, a nineteenth century links that still plays like one. The concession is scale. Gearhart is not Bandon, it does not try to be, and golfers who need length, drama, and a logo ball marker will drive south and pay for all three. What Gearhart offers instead is the oldest conversation in Oregon golf, still going, at a public price. First, and it should not be a debate.

## 2Astoria Golf and Country Club

Astoria Golf and Country Club, north up the coast, is the private entry, built on the Clatsop dunes where the land does the interesting work before any architect gets a vote. Dune golf is movement golf: uneven lies, blind moments, shots that have to be invented rather than executed, and Astoria's ground gives it a character no inland private club in Oregon can copy.

It finishes second for two honest reasons. Access is the smaller one; private is private, and plenty of fine courses are. The bigger one is that Astoria's quirk, glorious in a member's weekly game, can tip into scruffiness of argument. Is that hole brilliant or just odd? Members have been having that fight for generations, which is its own kind of praise. A visitor who gets the invite should take it without hesitation. It is the most distinctive private round on this stretch of coast.

## 3Seaside Golf Course

Seaside Golf Course is the nine hole public course in the beach town next door, and ranking it third of three requires no cruelty. It is small, friendly, flat in the way coastal pasture golf tends to be, and exactly right for the golfer it serves: the family on vacation, the beginner, the evening nine after a day on the sand.

The concession runs in its favor. Seaside never pretends to be Gearhart, and a town's golf needs a course where a twelve year old can play without apology. But a ranking of the best courses has to rank them, and Seaside's ceiling is the lowest here by design. Play it at dusk with people you like and it will do its job perfectly. That job is just not the one this list is scoring.

Three courses, one of them older than the state fair, and the wind rearranging the order in somebody's mind every single day. That is enough for one small town.

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