# The Best Golf Courses in Grand Forks

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-grand-forks-nd/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / North Dakota


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1997 the Red River came into Grand Forks and remade the city. King's Walk is part of what came back: an Arnold Palmer links, built on the flat valley ground after the flood, in a town that had just learned exactly what that flat ground could do. Northern prairie cities do not usually respond to disaster by building a Palmer course. Grand Forks did, and it changed what golf in the northern valley could be.

The bench is short. Three courses: the Palmer links, the established country club, and the old in-town public course. Candour suits a list like this. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and the interest here is not depth. It is that a city this size, this far north, has a headline course with a genuine story behind it at all.

## 1King's Walk Golf Course

Palmer's name is on a lot of courses, and they are not all equal, so the name alone wins nothing here. What wins is the concept executed on this ground: a links in the Red River Valley, open and wind-exposed, built to play along the turf rather than through the air, on land where the flood had wiped the slate clean. Links golf is the right answer for flat, windy country. It always was. It just took a catastrophe and a famous designer to get one built in Grand Forks.

The concession is that a manufactured links is still manufactured. The purist will note, correctly, that this is links style rather than links land, prairie soil dressed in fescue colours. We accept the point and rank it first anyway. King's Walk gives northern North Dakota a style of golf available almost nowhere else in the region, and it carries the city's comeback in its bones. Courses with a reason to exist beat courses that merely exist, every time.

## 2Grand Forks Country Club

The country club is the pre-flood order of things: private, established, tree-lined valley golf of the traditional kind, and the competitive centre of the local game for the golfers who belong. Where King's Walk is open and modern in conception, the country club is enclosed and settled, a members' course that knows exactly what it is.

It takes second because King's Walk has the bigger idea and the bigger stage, not because the club's golf is poor. In a straight vote among the town's serious players, this could be closer than the ranking suggests, and the club's defenders would point to maturity and membership golf played week after week, which a ranking visit undervalues. Noted, and conceded. The Palmer course still has the stronger claim on a visitor's one round and on the town's golf identity.

## 3Lincoln Park Golf Course

Lincoln Park is the old public golf in town, the accessible round, the course woven into the park and the neighbourhoods rather than set apart from them. Golf in northern towns survives on courses like this: affordable, close, unpretentious, and full of people learning the game or keeping a league alive through a short summer.

It finishes third on a three-course bench, and the reasons are scale and ambition rather than any failure. Lincoln Park was built for the city's everyday golf and it still does that job. The flood rebuilt Grand Forks, Palmer gave it a flagship, the country club kept its order, and Lincoln Park kept the tee sheet open for everybody else. That is a complete little golf town, and the river that nearly ended it now runs quietly past all three.

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