Town Rankings / Nevada

The Best Golf Courses in Incline Village

Incline Village is Tahoe's Nevada shore: pine forest, serious money in quiet houses, and a lake so clear it recalibrates what the word blue means for the rest of your life. The golf belongs to the community in a way resort golf rarely does. Both courses are run for the village's residents and their guests, which gives Incline a two course system with a clear division of labor: a championship course down near the lake's elevation, and a short mountain course climbing the slope above it.

Two courses is the whole bench, and we will not pretend otherwise. But the pairing is the story here. A father and son, both named Robert Trent Jones, built the two courses, one the full examination and one the compressed, steep, mischievous version. Ranked first and second, argued about by every household in the village, they make Incline Village a more interesting golf town than places with five forgettable courses.

1Incline Village Championship Course

The Championship Course is Robert Trent Jones Sr.'s work at Tahoe's north shore, and it has the senior Jones's fingerprints all over it: a course built for the aerial game of its era, demanding carries, greens defended like positions, and a routing that uses the forested ground down toward the lake as a full championship test rather than a scenic stroll.

That last point deserves emphasis, because Tahoe golf gets sold on scenery and this course's real argument is rigor. The trees are not decoration. They are the hazards, tight enough in places to turn a loose drive into a punch out and a lost hole, and the greens ask to be approached from the correct side with a properly struck shot, the old Jones doctrine that a course should separate players without apology.

The concession is that doctrine itself. Jones Sr. golf can feel penal to a modern recreational player, and the Championship Course, played from the wrong tees in a swirling mountain wind, will take a casual round apart. It also carries premium Tahoe pricing, residents and guests first, visitors paying for the privilege of the north shore. None of that changes the verdict. This is a serious course in a serious setting, the best golf in Incline Village by a distance everyone locally already acknowledges.

2Incline Village Mountain Course

The Mountain Course is the son's course, Robert Trent Jones Jr.'s short, steep sibling to his father's championship layout, and it might be the most fun per dollar and per hour in the village. It climbs. It drops. It asks for short shots played precisely on ground that will not accept a sloppy one, because on a mountainside a miss does not just find a bunker, it finds a slope with plans for your ball.

Executive length golf gets condescended to by players who measure courses in total yards, and the Mountain Course is the rebuttal. What it lacks in driver swings it returns in touch shots, uneven lies, and greens you have to think your way onto. Good players use it as a scoring examination. Families use it as the round that fits before dinner. Both are right, which is more than most full size courses can claim.

It ranks second because second is what it was built to be, the complement rather than the rival, and there is no shame in a course knowing its job and doing it this well. Play the father's course for the test and the son's for the pleasure, ideally in that order, and finish the day down at the lake, where the water is doing the thing that makes people forgive Tahoe its prices.