Town Rankings / Michigan
The Best Golf Courses in Roscommon
Roscommon is a small town in the woods of northern Lower Michigan, and almost nobody would know its name if the golf had not arrived. The Au Sable forest is the setting: pine country, river country, the kind of Michigan that smells like a campfire. Into that quiet, one resort built two of the most discussed courses in the Midwest, and it built them as opposite arguments about what a golf course is. One is a polished forest course by a master of the polished forest course. The other can be played backwards.
That is the whole list, two courses at one address, and it still produces a genuine argument, because the question is not which course is better maintained or better looking. The question is whether novelty, executed at the highest level, beats convention executed at the highest level. We score the golf first, then the day. On golf as an idea, the reversible course wins. On golf as a championship test, its sibling answers back. The order below takes the idea, and says why.
1The Loop at Forest Dunes
The Loop is Tom Doak's reversible course, played clockwise one day and counter-clockwise the next, two routings sharing the same ground, the same greens approached from opposite directions. Reversible golf sounds like a party trick until you stand in a fairway you played yesterday from the other end and realize the hole has changed its mind about everything: the angle, the safe side, the shot it wants. That is not a gimmick. That is architecture making one piece of land do the work of two courses, and nobody else in American golf has built the idea at this scale and pulled it off.
The concession deserves its full weight. The Loop asks more of a first-time visitor than any course should, because the round refuses to settle into memory the way a normal routing does, and golfers who like to learn a course over a weekend will leave feeling they played two halves of something. It can also read as austere next to its sibling's polish. Spartan is a defensible philosophy. It is not everyone's idea of a resort day.
It still finishes first here, because rankings should reward the course that changes how you think about the ground under your feet. Forest Dunes the original is a course you admire. The Loop is a course you argue about on the drive home, and argument is the higher compliment.
2Forest Dunes Golf Club
Forest Dunes is Tom Weiskopf in the Au Sable forest, and it is the course that put Roscommon on the map before the reversible experiment existed. Weiskopf's gift has always been playability with teeth: width that invites the driver, decisions that arrive a shot later, greens that ask questions politely and then mark the answers strictly. In the pines, with the forest closing in and the river country all around, that style produced a course that serious golfers respected immediately and resort golfers could actually enjoy. That combination built the resort's reputation, and reputations earned that way do not evaporate.
Its concession is that it now plays the straight man. Next to a sibling that reverses direction daily, a beautifully made conventional course reads as the conservative choice, and a ranking that prizes originality will always push it to second. Some golfers will flip this order without hesitation, preferring the complete, settled test to the experiment. That is a fair vote. It is just not ours.
Roscommon, in the end, is a town with two courses and one real question, which is more than most golf towns ten times its size can claim. Play them on consecutive days, the forest course first and the backwards one second, and the drive out through the pines will not be long enough to settle it.