Town Rankings / Utah

The Best Golf Courses in Park City

Park City is a ski town that tolerates summer, and its golf exists in the off-season's long light. The city course sits at 6,900 feet, where the ball flies a club farther and every local knows exactly which visiting flatlander will refuse to believe it until the third tee.

Four courses make this ranking, and they divide by the town's real fault line: the private clubs where the second-home money plays, and the public golf that the city itself runs surprisingly well. Jeremy Ranch sits off I-80 in the pines, Palmer golf on the drive in. Park Meadows anchors the private side inside town. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and at altitude the honest complication is that the best course and the best story are not the same course.

1Park Meadows Country Club

Park Meadows takes first place as the strongest private test in Park City proper, the members' course that the town's serious golf revolves around. It plays in the open meadowland below the ski runs, exposed to the mountain wind, without the tree cover to hide in that its rivals enjoy. Golf in the open, at altitude, in weather: that is a real examination, and it is why the club course outranks prettier neighbours.

The concession is the standing one for this town. Private means private, and in a resort economy the door is not opening for a visitor with a credit card. Estimates for clubs at this level in Park City run well into serious money, and they are only estimates, since the club does not publish them. The ranking is about the golf, and the golf holds up.

2Jeremy Ranch Golf and Country Club

Jeremy Ranch is Palmer in the pines off I-80, and the description does double duty: an Arnold Palmer design identity, all risk and reward and go-for-it temptation, in a pine setting that feels like a different Utah from the open meadows in town. Plenty of golfers driving up the canyon have played Jeremy Ranch more than any course actually in Park City, because it catches you on the way in and it is hard to drive past.

It lands second by a nose. The Palmer flash gives it the most memorable individual holes in this ranking, but across 18 the meadowland test at Park Meadows is the sterner, steadier examination. Fans of the King will dispute it. Good. That is what second place is for.

3Park City Golf Club

The city 18 at 6,900 feet is the public heart of Park City golf, municipally run in a town where almost everything else is priced for visitors. Altitude does its party trick here daily, drives sailing in thin air, egos inflating in direct proportion. Underneath the novelty is a solid public course that carries the town's everyday game while the private clubs carry its prestige.

Third place, first choice for almost everybody reading this. A ranking can hold both truths at once, and this one does.

4Canyons Golf Course

Canyons rounds out the four, ski-resort golf in the vertical sense, holes draped over terrain that was arranged for winter first. It is the most scenic round in the ranking on the right evening and the least essential as pure golf: resort courses built on ski mountains trade shot values for views, and this one makes that trade openly.

Play it for the setting, late in the day, and do not keep score too seriously. In Park City that is sometimes exactly the assignment.

At 6,900 feet the light lasts forever in June, the ball hangs in the thin air a beat longer than it should, and the ski town, for a few quiet months, belongs to the golfers.