# The Best Golf Courses in Grand Junction

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-grand-junction-co/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Colorado


A leading golf course in Colorado. Photo: Jeffrey Beall, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The drive into Grand Junction tells you the golf before you see a flag. Red cliffs, the Colorado National Monument standing over the valley, desert light that makes everything look carved. Western Colorado does not do the green mountain postcard. It does rock, river, and big sky, and its best course leans into all three so hard that national magazines noticed a course most Colorado golfers had never played. That course is the story here. The other two entries are really an argument about what comes after a clear No. 1.

## 1Redlands Mesa Golf Club

Jim Engh built Redlands Mesa under the red cliffs of the Colorado National Monument, and Golfweek put it at No. 1 among Colorado's public courses for years. Hold both facts at once, because together they explain the place. Engh's style is theatrical, muscular, sculpted, the opposite of minimalism, and in this setting the theater has a worthy stage. Holes drop and climb against that red rock backdrop, greens sit in bowls and on shelves, and the whole round feels composed, for better and occasionally for worse.

The concession is the style itself. Engh's heavy shaping divides golfers. Purists find some of it excessive, a course performing when it could simply play. Fair enough. But in a state full of mountain courses that blur together in memory, Redlands Mesa is unmistakable, and a public course that held the top spot in Colorado rankings for years earned that run against serious competition down in Denver and the resorts. Nothing else in Grand Junction is within shouting distance. This is a destination course wearing a local address.

## 2Bookcliff Country Club

Bookcliff is the private club, the old Grand Junction establishment option, named for the cliffs that run north of the valley. Its golf is the traditional counterweight to Redlands Mesa's showmanship: a member's course, parkland in spirit even in desert country, kept for people who play it weekly and value the condition of the place and the company as much as any single hole.

It takes second on substance, with the usual private caveat attached. Estimates for clubs like this are never published and we will not invent one; the realistic route in is knowing somebody. The golf itself is respectable rather than remarkable, and against most towns' benches that is enough for No. 2 comfortably. Against Redlands Mesa it is a different weight class, and Bookcliff's own members, driving past the Monument on the way to their club, probably know it.

## 3Tiara Rado Golf Course

Tiara Rado is the city course, public, affordable, and blessed with the same western views that make Redlands Mesa famous, seen from flatter and friendlier ground. That is its whole appeal and it is a good one. You get the Monument, the Bookcliffs, the desert light, at municipal prices, on a course that a high handicapper can enjoy without losing a dozen balls to the scenery.

Third is the honest spot. The test is gentler, the design less ambitious, and no ranking that scores golf first can pretend otherwise. But run the value math and Tiara Rado embarrasses plenty of higher ranked courses across the West. Grand Junction's list is top heavy, one headline course and two supporting acts. The supporting acts, one private and traditional, one public and open to all, cover the town between them. Most visitors will play Redlands Mesa once and talk about it for a year. The locals, playing under the same red cliffs for a fraction of the price, are not obviously getting the worse deal.

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