Town Rankings / Washington

The Best Golf Courses in Olympia

Olympia is a government town at the bottom of Puget Sound, all low cloud and evergreen and quiet streets, and its golf ranking has a wrinkle that tells you a lot about the South Sound. The best course on this list is not in Olympia at all. It is up the road in Shelton, built by a tribal nation on its own land, and it is good enough that any honest Olympia list has to start by driving out of Olympia.

Inside the city limits the picture is simpler: one old private club and one public workhorse over in Lacey that keeps the everyday game running. Three courses, three completely different jobs. This ranking puts the golf first, which means the visitor from Shelton takes the top spot, the members' course takes second, and the course most Olympia golfers actually play takes third. That order is defensible. It is also a little unfair, and we will say where.

1Salish Cliffs Golf Club Shelton

Salish Cliffs is the Squaxin Island tribe's Gene Bates course in Shelton, and it is the clear No. 1 for the Olympia area. Bates routed it through forested, rolling ground with real isolation between holes. For long stretches a round there feels like the rest of the world has been switched off. No houses crowding the fairways, no parallel holes trading noise, just tall trees and the next shot.

That seclusion is the course's signature and its argument. South Sound golf is mostly parkland among suburbs. Salish Cliffs is a drive into the woods that ends at a serious, modern, well-kept test, the kind of course that gets mentioned when people talk about the better public golf in the state, not just in the county.

The concession is geography and it is not trivial. Shelton is a genuine drive from Olympia, which makes Salish Cliffs a destination round rather than an Olympia round in any daily sense. If you live in Olympia and play twice a week, this is not your course. It is the course you save for the day you want the best golf within reach. On quality, the gap to second place is the widest on this list.

2Olympia Country and Golf Club

The private club is the town's own best golf: an established members' course, traditional in character, the sort of place where the same families have played for generations and the course has been shaped by that continuity rather than by any single design statement.

Members' clubs like this one earn their ranking on conditioning, pace, and the accumulation of small decisions made well over a long time. The round is coherent. The club knows what it is.

The concession is the locked gate, as ever. Olympia Country and Golf Club is not an option for the public golfer, the visiting legislator, or anybody else without a member in their corner. It also gives up the wow factor to Salish Cliffs; nothing here matches that walk in the trees. Second place, solidly, and the best golf with an Olympia address by a wide margin.

3Capitol City Golf Club

Capitol City is the public workhorse in Lacey, and every golf town needs exactly this course: affordable, busy, forgiving enough to keep beginners coming back and honest enough to occupy a decent player for an afternoon. It is where Olympia's public game actually lives.

Third place on architecture is no insult here because architecture was never the assignment. The concession is that Capitol City will not thrill you. It is a flat-out utility course, maintained to a public budget, played hard by a lot of golfers.

But run the numbers that matter to a town. Rounds hosted, kids introduced to the game, league nights filled, state workers out after session. By those measures Capitol City is the most important course on this list, and if you are a visitor without connections it is also, Salish Cliffs aside, the round you can simply go and play. The ranking says third. The town would say indispensable, and both things are true.