# The Best Golf Courses in Hudson

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-hudson-wi/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Wisconsin


A leading golf course in Wisconsin. Photo: Jhansen23, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Cross the St. Croix River from Minnesota and the land changes its mind. The bluffs rise, the river goes wide and slow below them, and Hudson stops feeling like a suburb and starts feeling like a place people drive to on purpose. Twin Cities golfers have treated it that way for years. It is their Wisconsin escape, close enough for a weekday round, different enough to feel like a trip.

Hudson's bench is two courses deep and this list will not pretend otherwise. One is a name course that draws golfers across a state line. The other is the town's own club, the round Hudson golfers play when nobody is visiting. We score the golf first, then the day around it, then what it costs in money and effort to get on. On those terms the order is not close at the top, and the honest interest is in what each course is actually for.

## 1Troy Burne Golf Club

Troy Burne is Tom Lehman's course in the St. Croix bluffs, and it carries the weight of that sentence well. Lehman is a Minnesota golfer who won at the highest level, and his name on a course twenty minutes from the Twin Cities is not decoration. The golf has a designed, intentional feel to it, the kind where the ground was asked questions and the answers were built into the holes. The bluff setting does the rest. Elevation, river valley air, long views that remind you the flat metro is behind you.

The concession is access of a different kind: Troy Burne is the round you plan. Twin Cities golfers cross the river for it, tee sheets reflect that, and nobody stumbles onto it by accident on a quiet Tuesday and owns the place. It plays like a destination because it is one, at least by local standards.

That is also the verdict. If a golfer from anywhere asks where to play near Hudson, this is the answer, and it is not a debate worth staging. Troy Burne is the reason Hudson appears on Twin Cities golf itineraries at all.

## 2Hudson Golf Club

Hudson Golf Club is the other Hudson, the one that exists the other six days of the week. Every golf town has this course: the local club where the leagues run, where the same groups hold the same Saturday times, where the golf is measured less against magazine lists and more against whether the afternoon worked. It does not have a tour player's name attached and it does not need one to justify its existence.

The honest concession cuts the other way here. A visitor with one free day in the St. Croix Valley should not spend it here when Troy Burne is in the same town. Hudson Golf Club's case is cumulative, built over a season of ordinary rounds for the people who live nearby, and cumulative cases lose one day shootouts every time.

Still, a ranking of Hudson golf that only named the destination course would miss how the town actually plays the game. Hudson Golf Club is the local game, Troy Burne is the occasion. Most weeks, local golf is the one that matters more.

Two courses, two jobs, no padding. The bluffs go dark over the river, the cars head back across the bridge to Minnesota, and Hudson keeps the better secret than most suburbs get to keep: its golf is worth the drive, and short.

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