Town Rankings / Michigan

The Best Golf Courses in Harris

Harris is a small town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and its golf exists because a casino resort decided the UP deserved destination golf built to a serious standard. Island Resort and Casino put two courses into the woods here, Sweetgrass and Sage Run, and between them they make Harris something the UP has not historically been: a place golfers plan a trip around, on purpose, from hours away. That is the whole story of this list. Two real courses, one resort, and a third entry we will deal with honestly when we get to it.

1Sweetgrass Golf Club

Sweetgrass is the elder of the pair and the one that built the reputation: a resort course in the best sense, wide enough to play, strategic enough to think about, and maintained to a standard that embarrasses bigger markets. It threads through UP country, meadow and cedar and open sky, with a finishing stretch that has a habit of deciding matches that thought they were settled. Tournament golf has found its way here too, the developmental tour level, and the course handles it without looking stretched.

The concession is that Sweetgrass plays friendly by design. It is resort golf, built to send guests home happy, and its defenses are more about angles and green complexes than about punishment. A player looking for a bruiser will find the second course on this list more to taste. But complete beats bruising. Sweetgrass is the fullest expression of what this resort set out to prove, that the UP could do destination golf properly. It proved it. First.

2Sage Run Golf Club

Sage Run is Paul Albanese routed through drumlins, the long glacial ridges that give the course its heaving, rumpled character, and it is the wilder round of the two. Where Sweetgrass is composed, Sage Run is rugged: holes climbing and falling over the ridges, shots shaped by land that was never going to be tamed into a resort postcard. Golfers who like their courses with some wilderness still in them tend to pick Sage Run as the pair's better half, and the argument is respectable.

We keep it second, narrowly. The drumlin ground produces a few holes where the land is doing more talking than the design, and the round can feel uneven next to Sweetgrass's steady build. But understand the margin here. This is a one two finish between two courses that would headline most towns in the Upper Midwest, separated by taste more than by quality. If you make the drive to Harris and play only one, you have done the trip wrong.

3Island Resort and Casino Golf

Now the honesty. Island Resort and Casino Golf is not a third golf course. It is the name of the operation itself, the umbrella over Sweetgrass and Sage Run, and it appears on this list because the resort's golf gets catalogued that way. We are not going to invent a phantom eighteen holes to fill the spot, and we are not going to pad this ranking with a course that does not exist.

What the umbrella does deserve credit for is the package: two distinct courses, a casino hotel steps away, stay and play pricing aimed at getting golfers to make the UP drive, and a level of investment this region rarely sees in golf. As an operation it would rank first on a list of golf resorts in the UP. As a course entry it ranks third, because it is not one, and the two real courses above earned their spots the hard way, hole by hole.

Harris, then, is a two course town wearing a three line list, and the two courses are good enough that nobody should feel shorted. The woods are deep, the light lasts forever in June, and the drive home across the UP gives you hours to argue Sweetgrass against Sage Run. That argument is the souvenir.