# The Best Golf Courses in Killington

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-killington-vt/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Vermont


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

Killington is a ski town that golfers visit by accident and then, some of them, on purpose. The mountain dominates everything here, including the calendar. Golf season in central Vermont is short, green, and squeezed between mud season and foliage, and the town has exactly two courses to rank. We will not pretend the bench is deeper than it is.

What the short bench has going for it is a clear public headline act. Green Mountain National is a Gene Bates design, a municipal course owned in a town defined by a resort, and it holds the title of Vermont's top public course most years in the state conversation. Its only local rival is the resort's own course up by the mountain. So this ranking is a referendum on a familiar question in ski country. Does the serious public course beat the course attached to the big resort operation, or does the resort day win on convenience and setting?

We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in a two horse town that formula produces a clear answer with one honest caveat attached.

## 1Green Mountain National Golf Course

Green Mountain National is No. 1, and being a municipal course is central to why, not incidental.

Most towns in Killington's position end up with golf that serves the resort first and residents by leftovers. A town owned course designed by Gene Bates reverses that priority. It was built as a real golf course, for the public, in a state where the public supply of serious golf is thin enough that one course can plausibly be called Vermont's top public most years without the claim sounding like hometown inflation. That standing, repeated across seasons in the state debate, is the strongest evidence on this page. Rankings in a small state are intimate. Golfers have played the contenders. A muni that keeps winning that argument is winning it in person.

Bates's design brief in mountain country is never easy. Central Vermont terrain rolls and climbs, and a public course here has to challenge the strong player without making a summer visitor in a rented condo miserable by the sixth hole. A course that threads that needle well enough to anchor a state's public rankings has done the hardest job in municipal golf.

The concession is the season, and it is not trivial. Killington golf lives in a compressed window, and spring and fall rounds here can be raw in a way that golfers from longer season states will find genuinely shocking. The course's case rests on summer, when Vermont is at its greenest and the days run long. Judge it in late October and you are judging the climate, not the golf.

None of that dethrones it. The best public course in Vermont, owned by its town, in a resort's shadow, winning on the golf rather than the amenities, is a story American golf should have more of. In Killington it is the ranking, first by a clear margin.

## 2Killington Resort Golf Course

The resort course is second, and its job in this town is different enough that the comparison deserves a sentence of fairness before the verdict.

A resort course at a major ski mountain exists to complete a summer stay. It gives the guest who came for hiking, biking, or a wedding a round without leaving the resort's orbit, and it gives the mountain a summer pulse. Judged on that job, it succeeds by existing at a standard that keeps golfers reasonably happy on a course they did not travel to Vermont specifically to play.

The concession runs in the other direction too. If your trip is a resort weekend and the alternative requires organizing cars and tee times across town, the convenience argument is real, and for a casual group the best course is often the one everybody actually plays. We concede that freely.

But a ranking of golf courses, rather than vacation logistics, cannot put the amenity ahead of the course that carries a state's public reputation. Killington Resort's course is the supporting act at its own mountain, which is a strange sentence and a true one. The town course outranks the resort course in the resort's town because the town course is simply the more serious golf.

Two courses, a short season, and one clear lesson. In Killington, when the snow melts, the best golf in town belongs to the town, and the big mountain spends the summer playing second fiddle to a muni down the road.

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