Town Rankings / New Hampshire
The Best Golf Courses in North Conway
North Conway is a valley town that lives under a mountain. Mount Washington sits up the road making its own weather, and the golf here plays in the leftovers: wind that was not in the forecast, clouds that arrive over the ridge in the middle of a back nine, summer light that lasts long enough to make an evening round feel like a second day. Nobody books North Conway as a golf trip. They book it for the mountains, the outlet stores, the ski weekends in winter, and then somebody in the group asks where they can play.
That honesty shapes this list. This is a short bench: one real town club in North Conway itself and two small courses up the road in Jackson, the ski village that turns its attention to golf when the snow leaves. We score the golf first, then the day around it, then how easily a visitor can actually get on. On those terms there is a clear first, a pleasant second, and a third that exists because Jackson in July needs somewhere for a guest at a big old hotel to swing a club.
1North Conway Country Club
The town club takes the top spot because it is the only course here that carries a whole golf day on its own. It sits in the valley under Mount Washington's weather, which is both the setting and the test. Valley golf in the White Mountains is not target golf in a dome. The air moves, the temperature can drop a full layer between the front nine and the back, and a round here asks you to play the conditions in front of you rather than the card in your hand.
That is a compliment, not a caveat. A town club that makes its own weather part of the examination is doing what northern New England golf has always done. The course serves the town first: members, summer people, the visitor who wants one proper round while the family does everything else North Conway is actually famous for. The golf has to stand up for all of them, and by local reputation it does, week after week, in a season that is short enough to punish any course that wastes it.
The concession is the season itself. White Mountains golf is a compressed business. The best weeks are glorious and the shoulder weeks are a negotiation with frost, rain, and a mountain that does not care about your tee time. A club this far north will never match the conditioning window of courses two states south, and pretending otherwise would be brochure talk.
None of that moves it from No. 1. In a town where golf is the second or third reason for the visit, the course that gives you a full, weather-beaten, genuinely local round is the course that matters. North Conway Country Club is that round.
2Wentworth Golf Club (Jackson)
Jackson is the prettier village, covered bridge, ski lifts on the hill, and Wentworth is its more complete golf option. The hook on both Jackson courses is that they are small, and Wentworth wears that honestly: this is village golf, scaled to a place that spends half the year under snow and likes it that way.
What Wentworth has over its neighbour is that it feels like a destination for the round itself rather than an amenity attached to a stay. Golfers driving over from North Conway for a quieter morning end up here. The setting does heavy lifting, mountain air and a village that looks like a postcard without trying, but the course has to give you enough golf to justify leaving the town club behind, and in Jackson it is the one that does.
The honest knock is scale. Small courses run out of questions somewhere around the turn, and a strong player will have seen most of what Wentworth asks by the second nine. That is fine for the trip it serves. It is only a problem if you came looking for a championship test, and nobody with a map of New Hampshire thinks Jackson is where that lives.
3Eagle Mountain House Golf Course (Jackson)
Third place belongs to the hotel course, and there is no shame in the category. The Eagle Mountain House is one of those grand White Mountains hotels, and its golf exists so a guest can walk out after breakfast, play quickly, and be back for the rest of a mountain day. Judged as a resort amenity it does its job. Judged against a town club and a proper village course, it finishes where it finishes.
The concession in its favour: for a beginner, a kid, or a skier whose knees are on a summer schedule, this might be the most useful golf in Jackson. Not the best. The most useful. Rankings score the best.
Play the town club for the real round, Wentworth for the pretty one, and the hotel course when the day has other plans. Then drive up the valley in the evening light and remember the golf was never the headline here. The mountain was, and the golf is better for admitting it.