Town Rankings / New York
The Best Golf Courses in Lake Placid
Lake Placid sells the Olympics. Two Winter Games, a miracle on ice, ski jumps on the skyline. Golf here is the summer tenant, and it has a local hero of its own: Craig Wood, born in Lake Placid, who in 1941 won the Masters and the U.S. Open in the same year, a feat from the era when that double was close to unthinkable. The town named its municipal course for him. Mountain golf at Olympic prices minus the Olympics, as the saying goes here, except the municipal course is priced like a municipal course, which is the best deal in the village.
Three courses make the list: two resort and club courses with Adirondack views and one honest muni with a champion's name. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. In Lake Placid the setting does unusual work, because the High Peaks are in your eye line from nearly every tee in town.
1Whiteface Club Golf Course
The Whiteface Club takes first on the strength of the total package: a course at the foot of Whiteface Mountain, on the shore side of Lake Placid itself, where the golf plays through a classic Adirondack resort setting of pines, water and long mountain views. It is the round visitors picture when they book the trip, and unlike some picture postcard courses, the golf holds up: a traditional, walkable layout that asks for placement in the corridors and touch on greens that tilt with the ground more than they first appear to.
The concession is that Whiteface is a resort club experience, priced and polished accordingly, and purists who want their Adirondack golf rough around the edges will find it a touch manicured for the mountains. We accept the polish. In a short season town, the course that combines the best site, the best condition and a full test wins, and Whiteface is that course.
2Lake Placid Club Resort Links Course
The Lake Placid Club is the grand old institution, the resort that more or less invented Adirondack summer, and its Links Course is the more historic of its layouts, an open, wind exposed test in the old style, set in a broad valley with the peaks arranged around it like a gallery. Links in name and in spirit if not in soil: the ball runs, the wind matters, and the golf has a spare, honest quality the manicured Mountain Course across the property trades for scenery.
Why second? The Links can feel exposed and plain on a still, grey day, and its charms are subtler than Whiteface's. The concession we owe it: on a bright, breezy morning, many good players would flip this order, and the Links' open ground game is the most distinctive golf in the town. It loses here on consistency of the overall day, not on character. Character it has in surplus.
3Craig Wood Golf Course
Craig Wood Golf Course is the municipal course, and it finishes third on golf while winning the town on value and affection, a familiar split. The golf is straightforward mountain muni golf: some views that would cost a fortune anywhere else, conditioning that follows a public budget, and a name over the door that carries 1941 with it. Craig Wood won the Masters and the U.S. Open in the same spring and summer, then came home to the Adirondacks. Every town should honour its champions this usefully.
Play it. Not instead of the resort courses, but as the second round of the day or the first round of the trip, when your swing is still travelling. The concession from us: if this ranking weighted value at double, Craig Wood wins Lake Placid outright. It does not. So third, with respect, and with the note that third here still comes with High Peaks in the background.
Evening in Lake Placid, the jumps lit up across the valley, golfers walking in with the mountains going purple. The Olympics were two weeks, twice. The golf is every summer.