Town Rankings / North Dakota

The Best Golf Courses in Medora

Medora is a small town at the gate of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and it has exactly one golf course. This is not a ranking with a bench. It is a ranking with a single name on it, and we would rather say that plainly than dress one course up as a list. Bully Pulpit is the best golf course in Medora the way the Badlands are the best scenery in Medora: by acclamation, unopposed, and in this case entirely deserved.

The country around Medora is the North Dakota Badlands, buttes and striped formations eroded out of the plains, the landscape that worked on Theodore Roosevelt when he came west in the 1880s and remade himself. Golf did not have to work here. Flat prairie was available an hour in any direction. Instead the course went into the formations, and that decision is the whole story.

1Bully Pulpit Golf Course

Michael Hurdzan designed Bully Pulpit in the buttes by the national park, and three holes climb into the formations themselves. Hold on to that detail, because it separates this course from a hundred scenic also-rans. Plenty of courses have views of dramatic land. Very few route holes up into it, so the buttes stop being a backdrop and become the architecture, the thing shaping the shot, the miss, and the walk. For a stretch of the round you are not playing in front of the Badlands. You are playing inside them.

The rest of the course does the necessary work around that climax, prairie golf in the valley ground, exposed to the wind, giving the round a build rather than eighteen holes of shouting. A course that spent its whole length in the formations would exhaust the trick. Bully Pulpit rations it, and the restraint is what makes the climb land.

The setting earns its keep in a second way. The buttes are striped because they are layers, sediment laid down and then cut open by erosion, and from the fairways below the formations you read that geology at arm's length. Most scenic golf gives you a mountain range on the horizon, distant and decorative. The Badlands are close, eroded, and strange, and they make the ordinary holes around the climb feel grounded in a place rather than placed on it. Roosevelt came to this country in the 1880s to hunt, stayed to ranch, and credited the experience with making him. A golfer does not need the full biography to feel the point. This is landscape that changes the people who spend time in it, and a round here is a way of spending time in it slowly, on foot, with a purpose.

There is also the matter of access, which one-course towns often fumble. Bully Pulpit is open to the travelling golfer who makes the drive, no membership wall, no guest-of-a-member dance. Medora's whole economy runs on visitors coming for the park and the town's frontier theatre, and the course fits that bargain: show up, pay, and play the best ground in the region. The ranking may be unopposed, but the welcome is genuine.

Now the honest concessions, plural. It is the only course here, so first place costs it nothing. The setting is doing heavy lifting that the architecture, on the quieter holes, does not always match. And Medora is a trip, a long drive across the plains from anywhere, for one round of golf. Golfers who need a destination to have five courses and a spa will call that thin.

They are missing the arithmetic. One course, in country this singular, that puts three holes inside the Badlands formations, is a better reason to drive to Medora than a resort corridor of interchangeable golf would be. The town has a national park, a president's origin story, and a single golf course that understood its assignment. Play it late in the day, when the light gets into the stripes of the buttes and the climb on those three holes feels like the whole trip narrowing to a point.