# The Best Golf Courses in Minocqua

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-minocqua-wi/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Wisconsin


A leading golf course in Wisconsin. Photo: Jhansen23, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Minocqua is lake cabin country, the Northwoods of Wisconsin in its purest form: pine forest, water in every direction, and a summer population that arrives with boats and leaves when the leaves turn. Golf here was never going to be resort golf. It is cabin golf, played between the lake in the morning and the fish fry at night, and it has been played that way for a hundred years. Three courses make this list, and the honest headline is that one of them has been at it since 1924 and the town's golf identity starts and mostly ends there.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in the Northwoods the day counts for more than it does in a city. A course that fits cabin life earns something real here. Not enough to change the top spot. Enough to order the rest.

## 1Trout Lake Golf Club

Trout Lake dates to 1924, which makes it one of the old courses of the Northwoods, built when this region's summer season ran on trains and grand lodges. A course does not survive a century of northern Wisconsin summers by accident. It survives because generations of cabin families adopted it, taught their kids on it, and kept coming back to golf cut out of the pine forest with the lake country all around it. The golf itself is traditional Northwoods golf: trees that punish the crooked drive immediately, small targets, no wasted ground.

The concession is that 1924 golf is not modern golf. Trout Lake will not test a strong player's length or offer the scale of a contemporary layout, and players raised on resort courses may find it plain.

Plain is the wrong word for a hundred year old course that still anchors its region's summer. Trout Lake is Minocqua golf the way it has always been, and it tops this list on authenticity as much as architecture.

## 2Minocqua Country Club

Minocqua Country Club is the private side of the lake scene, the club for the families whose cabins became compounds, and it represents the other half of Northwoods golf: membership golf, seasonal and social, played by people who return to the same water every year. What escapes about the golf suggests a well kept members' course in a setting that does most of the talking, which in Minocqua is considerable talking.

The concession is the usual private one, sharpened by seasonality. Most golfers reading this will never see it, and its season is the short northern summer, which means its whole life is compressed into the same weeks as everything else here.

Second place, behind the public course with the century of history. In Minocqua, the course everyone can play is also the famous one, and that is a healthy arrangement for a town's golf.

## 3Timber Ridge Golf Club

Timber Ridge is the third option, public golf through the pines that does what its name promises, and it fills the practical role in a cabin golfer's week: the extra round, the one booked when Trout Lake's tee sheet is full of a century's worth of regulars. Golfers who play it describe a straightforward Northwoods test, trees and quiet, priced for locals and cabin renters rather than destination visitors.

The concession is that third in a three course town with a 1924 anchor at the top is a supporting role, and Timber Ridge's case rests on availability and value more than on any claim to be the region's best golf.

Supporting roles keep summers running. The pines close over the last fairways early in the northern evening, the lakes go flat, and Minocqua's golf, like everything else up here, has known exactly what it is for about a hundred years.

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