# The Best Golf Courses in Mackinac Island

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Michigan


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

Mackinac Island has no cars. You arrive by ferry, you get around by bicycle and horse, and the golf follows the same rules as everything else on the island: it runs on nineteenth century terms or it does not run at all. There are two courses. One belongs to the Grand Hotel and splits its round in half with a horse carriage ride. The other is the oldest continuously played course in Michigan. This is a two horse race, if you will forgive the only joke this island's transport system makes unavoidable, and it is a better race than most towns manage with six.

## 1Wawashkamo Golf Club

Wawashkamo is Alex Smith's work from 1898, Michigan's oldest continuously played course, and it is the purest golf experience in this ranking and close to the purest in the state. It sits in the island's interior and it plays the way golf played when Smith built it: over rumpled land, into the wind, with the ground game alive and the aerial game uninvented. Blind shots, odd lies, greens that sit where the land put them. Modern golf spent a century sanding off exactly what Wawashkamo kept.

Getting there is part of the test. There is no parking lot because there are no cars. You walk or bike into the middle of the island and the modern world thins out with every pedal stroke, until what is left is a links in the woods, quiet enough to hear your own footsteps on the fairway.

The concession: Wawashkamo is short, rustic, and indifferent to conditioning fashions, and golfers who equate quality with length and polish will file it under novelty. They will be wrong in the specific way rankings exist to correct. This is not a museum you play through. It is a living 1898 golf course that still works as golf, strategic, windy, and honest. First on Mackinac, and one of the easiest first place votes in Michigan.

## 2Grand Hotel Golf Course The Jewel

The Jewel is the Grand Hotel's course, and its two nines are split by a horse carriage ride, which is either the most charming intermission in golf or a logistical oddity, depending on your romance settings. The first nine plays around the hotel grounds with the Straits in view, the carriage carries you up into the island's woods, and the second nine plays through the trees back toward town. As an outing, as a piece of a Grand Hotel day, it is close to unbeatable: porch, carriage, fudge shops after. The whole island conspires to make this round pleasant.

As golf, judged cold, it finishes second. The split routing breaks a round's rhythm in a way no architect would choose on purpose, the test itself is resort gentle, and the setting does a great deal of the work the design leaves undone. We concede that most visitors will play the Grand Hotel course and skip Wawashkamo, and that they will have a lovely time, and that they will have missed the better golf by a mile and a century. Both things can be true on an island with no cars. There is no traffic to beat, so take the extra twenty minutes. Go inland.

Mackinac gives you golf from 1898 and golf as pageant, separated by a bike ride. Play both, in our order, and finish the day on the Grand Hotel porch watching the ferries, knowing the oldest course in Michigan is sitting quiet in the woods behind you, waiting for tomorrow.

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