# The Best Golf Courses in Juneau

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-juneau-ak/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Alaska


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There is no road to Juneau. The capital of Alaska is reached by air or by water, and its golf shares the isolation: one nine-hole course in a rainforest valley in the shadow of the Mendenhall Glacier, unconnected by road to any other golf anywhere. Most town rankings are arguments. This one is a census. Juneau has one course, so the list has one entry, and the honest work is explaining what that one course is and is not.

What Juneau golf is: local golf, in the purest sense left in America. Nobody builds a golf trip around nine holes in Southeast Alaska, where the rainforest climate keeps the ground soft and the season short. The course exists for the people who live there, in a town that cannot drive to a second option, and it gets played by golfers who have made their peace with weather that golfers in drier capitals would call unplayable. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in Juneau the setting keeps trying to outvote the golf.

## 1Mendenhall Golf Course

Mendenhall Golf Course is the whole list, the whole bench, the entire supply of golf in Juneau. Nine holes in a valley cut through temperate rainforest, with the Mendenhall Glacier in the neighborhood and the wet green walls of Southeast Alaska closing in around the golf. As a setting for nine holes, it is absurd, the kind of backdrop that destination courses in the Lower 48 spend fortunes trying to imitate with earthmoving. Juneau just has it, the way it has the rain.

The golf itself is modest, and this ranking will not pretend otherwise. Nine holes cannot carry the variety of an eighteen-hole test, the better player will run out of questions before he runs out of daylight, and the rainforest that makes the valley beautiful also makes it soft underfoot for much of the season. If the ranking rewarded architecture alone, a one-course town in the rain would have a hard time justifying ink at all.

Practical notes, for the golfer who finds himself in town with clubs: bring the rain gear you would pack for the wettest round of your life, and then bring more, because Southeast Alaska does not do drizzle by halves. Expect the ball to sit down in soft turf, expect a walk through country that looks untouched ten yards off the fairway, and expect the locals to be entirely unbothered by weather that would empty a clubhouse in Arizona.

But that is not the whole accounting. A course that is the only golf in a roadless capital is not competing with the course across town. It is competing with not playing. Mendenhall wins that competition every day it opens: nine honest holes, a glacier down the valley, a town full of golfers grateful the option exists. As a destination it is a reason to stop, to stretch the legs on a cruise day or a work trip, not a reason to book the flight. As a piece of American golf geography, a course at the edge of a glacier with no road out, it has no peer in the country.

Play it if you are in Juneau. Play it twice around if the rain holds off, which in that valley is never a promise. Then look up at the ice at the head of the valley and consider that the nearest other golf course is a ferry ride or a flight away, and that nobody on the tee seems to mind at all.

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