# The Best Golf Courses in Lewiston

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-lewiston-mi/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Michigan


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Lewiston is a small town in northern Michigan's woods, the kind of place with more lakes than traffic lights, and its golf map has exactly one name on it: Garland. The lodge at Garland runs four courses through the forest from one base, which makes this the most self contained ranking we publish. Every course here shares a parking lot, a pro shop orbit, and a stretch of northern woods. The differences are real but they are family differences, and ranking siblings requires saying plainly which one got the land, which one got the variety, and which ones are there to complete the rotation.

That is also the appeal. A Garland trip is golf as a closed system: eat, play, play again, argue at the lodge. The four courses below are best understood as four days or four moods, and the order matters less than the matching.

## 1Garland Lodge and Golf Resort Monarch Course

The Monarch is the flagship, the course the lodge leads with, and it earns the role on land: old growth white pines tower over the Monarch, and playing under trees that were standing before the resort existed gives the round a gravity the other three courses cannot borrow. The golf matches the setting, a traditional northern Michigan test through corridors of pine and hardwood, where the challenge is position and patience rather than spectacle.

The concession is that the Monarch's virtues are quiet ones. It does not produce the single photograph the other courses chase, and golfers who measure a course by its most dramatic hole will underrate it. We will take eighteen strong holes under ancient pines over three postcards and filler. First at Garland, first in Lewiston, by the oldest logic in golf: the best ground wins.

## 2Garland Lodge and Golf Resort Fountains Course

Fountains is the crowd pleaser of the four, the course with water in the story and a name that tells you so. It plays as Garland's scenic round, the one groups ask for by name on their second visit, and it gives the rotation something the Monarch does not: variety of mood. Where the Monarch is a walk in a cathedral of pines, Fountains is the resort showing you its lighter side.

It sits second because its best holes lean on their features rather than building the slow pressure the Monarch builds. That is not a failure. A four course resort needs its rotation to have a most requested middle, and Fountains holds that spot comfortably. If you play two rounds at Garland, the consensus itinerary is Monarch for the test and Fountains for the pleasure, and on this one the consensus is right.

## 3Garland Lodge and Golf Resort Swampfire Course

Swampfire has the best name at Garland and the most personality per hole: a course routed through wetlands and woods that wears its wilder edges openly. The name promises swamp, the course delivers atmosphere, and on a still morning with mist on the low ground it is the most atmospheric round of the four by a distance.

Atmosphere is not the same as architecture, and Swampfire's ceiling as a test sits below the two above it. Some of its challenge comes from the ground being what it is rather than from questions the design poses. Third, with genuine affection. Every resort rotation needs a course the group talks about at dinner, and at Garland that is this one, name and all.

## 4Garland Lodge and Golf Resort Reflections Course

Reflections completes the set: the gentlest of the four, the round for arrival day or departure morning, for the mixed group and the tired legs. It asks the least and gives back an easy walk in the same woods its siblings play through, which is not nothing. The trees do not check which course you are on.

It finishes fourth because one of them had to, and because on shot values it is plainly the lightest test at the lodge. No disgrace attaches. A four course resort with no weak sister is a fiction, and Garland's honesty about its own rotation, one flagship, one favorite, one character, one breather, is exactly why the place keeps groups coming back to Lewiston year after year.

Four courses, one lodge, and a town the size of a rumor in the pines. Garland is Lewiston golf entire, and the Monarch under the white pines is the reason the whole unlikely enterprise works.

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