# The Best Golf Courses in Pine Mountain

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-pine-mountain-ga/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Georgia


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Pine Mountain's golf exists because of flowers. Callaway Gardens came first, a vast garden built on worn-out cotton land in west Georgia, and the golf followed the azaleas. That order of priorities produced something unusual: a resort where the golf had to live up to the landscape instead of the other way around, on a ridge an hour and a bit from Atlanta that feels far more removed than the drive suggests.

This is a two-course town, and the ranking will not pretend otherwise. Both courses belong to Callaway Gardens, both are resort access, and the whole bench is one championship test and one gentler companion. We score the golf first, then the day, then value, and with two horses the race is about the distance between them, which is considerable and entirely by design.

## 1Callaway Gardens Mountain View Course

Mountain View is the serious one. A Dick Wilson era championship course, built out in 1951 with J.B. McGovern in its design lineage, set on the Pine Mountain ridge, it hosted the PGA Tour's Buick Challenge, in its Southern Open years too, 12 times. Tour events do not return a dozen times to a course that cannot separate a field, and Mountain View separated them with length, ridge-side slopes, and greens that asked questions vacation golf usually avoids.

The concession is that the tour left, and Mountain View now lives on a reputation earned in another era. Resort guests who play it expecting a museum piece get a shock. It is long, it is hilly by Georgia resort standards, and it does not care that you are on holiday. That severity is exactly why it ranks first here and why it still gets mentioned in conversations about Georgia's better public-access tests decades after the last Buick purse was paid out. In a two-course town, this is the course the town is actually known for, and it earns the position.

## 2Callaway Gardens Lake View Course

Lake View is the companion round, the friendlier Callaway test, built for the golfer who came for the gardens and stayed for nine more holes than planned. Where Mountain View climbs the ridge and argues, Lake View stays lower and pleasanter, a resort course in the original sense: scenery first, score second, a round that sends you back to dinner in a good mood.

The concession is built into the concept. Lake View is not the championship course, does not claim a tour past, and loses every head-to-head comparison of difficulty and design weight that this ranking is built on. Judged as the second half of a 36-hole resort day, though, it is doing its job precisely as intended. Not every course at a garden resort should be an examination. One examination and one walk in the park is the correct ratio, and Callaway, to its credit, never confused the two.

The right way to do Callaway is in the order this list ranks them. Mountain View in the morning, when you are fresh enough for what the ridge asks, then the gardens, then Lake View late if the legs and the light allow. Reversing the order is the common mistake: golfers warm up on the gentle course, arrive at the championship test tired and loose-swinging, and spend four hours learning why the Buick Challenge fields respected it. Sequencing is free. Use it.

Two courses, one ridge, and a garden that outdraws them both most weekends. Mountain View keeps the competitive soul of the place alive under the azaleas, and that is enough for Pine Mountain.

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