Town Rankings / Oregon
The Best Golf Courses in Portland, Oregon
In August 1996, Tiger Woods won his third straight U.S. Amateur at Pumpkin Ridge, in the farm country west of Portland, and the pump fake of a final, the comeback against Steve Scott, became part of the legend he carried into professional golf weeks later. Portland golf has been living in that long shadow ever since: a city with two great old private clubs, one famous 36 hole address in the suburbs, and a municipal course from 1917 that a city of this size has no business still having. It is a deeper bench than Oregon's reputation suggests.
The shape of it is old Portland versus new money versus the muni everyone can play. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and that order is what puts a private course most visitors will never see at the top of a list the public courses make respectable.
1Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club Witch Hollow
Witch Hollow is Pumpkin Ridge's private course, and it is the best golf in the Portland area. The routing works through wetlands, fir, and open meadow in the ghost of a valley northwest of town, and the design, Bob Cupp and John Fought's work, asks the championship question on almost every hole: which side, which shape, which miss can you afford. Woods won his Amateur across both Pumpkin Ridge courses in 1996, but Witch Hollow is where the site's ambition lives, a members' course that plays like it is still auditioning for majors.
The concession is the obvious one. Witch Hollow is private, expensive to chase, and unknown to most Portland golfers except as a name. A ranking that cared only about access would bury it, and we understand the instinct. But the top spot on this list is for the best course, and the best course in Portland is behind this gate. It is not particularly close.
2Portland Golf Club
Portland Golf Club is the city's old championship name, a private club west of downtown where Ben Hogan won the PGA Championship in 1946 and the United States won the Ryder Cup in 1947, on a tight, tree lined course that has been asking for placement over power since before Portland had suburbs. The land rolls more than visitors expect, the greens are the defense, and the whole place has the confidence of a club that hosted the game's biggest events when the game was smaller and has nothing left to prove.
Why second? Age cuts both ways. Portland Golf Club's test is complete but narrower in scope than Witch Hollow's, a master class in one dialect of golf, parkland precision, where the Pumpkin Ridge course speaks two or three. Members will call that focus a virtue, and some days we would agree with them. On the full card, second, with respect that is genuine rather than polite.
3Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club Ghost Creek
Ghost Creek is the public course at Pumpkin Ridge, the one Woods also played during that 1996 Amateur, and it is the strongest public test in the Portland metro. The routing shares Witch Hollow's valley and much of its character: wetlands to carry, fir to avoid, and a closing stretch that has decided real championships. Visitors who cannot get on the private side are not getting a consolation prize. They are getting most of the argument.
It ranks below its sibling for the honest reason that it was built to be the public sibling, a touch more forgiving, a touch less intricate around the greens. The gap is smaller than the access gap, which is the best thing we can say about a public course on this list. If you have one round in Portland and no connections, book Ghost Creek and do not spend a minute feeling shortchanged.
4Columbia Edgewater Country Club
Columbia Edgewater sits out by the airport, on flat ground along the Columbia River, and it is the working professional's course in this company: a private club with a long tournament life, best known as the longtime home of the LPGA's Portland stop, where generations of the best women players in the world have gone low on a course that rewards the golfer who shapes it both ways. The trees are the architecture here, rows of them turning ordinary length into a placement test.
Fourth is where its ceiling lands. The ground gives the designers less to work with than Pumpkin Ridge's valley or Portland Golf Club's roll, and flat golf has to win on details. Columbia Edgewater wins on plenty of them, which is why it has held a tour event while flashier courses have not. A serious club. It just plays in a league where three courses have more land and more history working for them.
5Eastmoreland Golf Course
Eastmoreland is the people's entry: a city course in southeast Portland, laid out in 1917 by H. Chandler Egan, the finest Pacific Northwest golfer of his era and a designer whose work still shows through more than a century of municipal budgets. You play it beside the rhododendron gardens and Johnson Creek, under big trees, for a city green fee, on a routing that predates most of the courses ranked above it.
Nobody sane puts Eastmoreland's conditioning or difficulty beside Witch Hollow's, and we are not starting now. It is fifth because Egan's bones are real, because a top five for Portland that ignores its public roots would be lying about the city's golf, and because on a June evening, walking a 1917 Egan routing for the price of lunch downtown, Eastmoreland delivers a day the private clubs cannot sell at any price. The gap above it is real. So is its place here.
Woods is long gone from Pumpkin Ridge and the Amateur trophies live elsewhere now, but the valley still goes quiet on an August evening the way it must have in 1996.