Town Rankings / New Mexico
The Best Golf Courses in Ruidoso
Ruidoso is a mountain escape town, all pine forest and cool air, where Texans and New Mexicans flee the desert floor in summer and the whole place smells faintly of piñon smoke. Golf here is altitude golf in the trees, a completely different game from the desert courses a couple of hours below, and the town's three courses divide the territory cleanly: a resort course by a lake on Mescalero Apache land, a links styled course in town, and a private club up in Alto.
Three courses is the whole story, and it is a good one. The ranking rewards the golf first, but in a town people visit to breathe cooler air, the day counts for more than it does in a city. Even so, the top spot goes to the best golf, because it also happens to deliver the best day.
1Inn of the Mountain Gods Championship Golf Course
The Inn of the Mountain Gods course is a Ted Robinson design on Mescalero Apache land, set by the lake below Sierra Blanca, and it is the round people are still describing on the drive home. Robinson built his reputation on water and movement, and here he had a mountain lake and forested ground to work with instead of a desert subdivision. The result is resort golf with actual scenery doing the work rather than decoration pasted on.
The setting is the argument and the golf backs it up. Playing at altitude in the pines, with the lake in play visually and sometimes literally, the round feels removed from everything, which is precisely what the resort sells and precisely what Ruidoso is for. Tee sheets fill with visitors who came for the casino and the cool air and leave talking about the golf.
The concession is price and purpose. This is a resort course at resort money, the most expensive day on this list by a distance, and it knows what it is. Golfers allergic to resort golf, the staff greetings, the GPS, the whole apparatus, will prefer the plainer option in town. They have a point about taste. They do not have the better golf course.
2The Links at Sierra Blanca
Sierra Blanca is Jim Colbert's links in town, and the concept sounds like a gimmick until you think about it: a links styled course at mountain altitude, where the ball flies forever and the ground game matters because the air gives you nothing to hide behind. Colbert, a tour player who understood shotmaking, built a course that plays more open and wind exposed than the tree lined resort course, and the contrast between the two is the best thing about Ruidoso golf. Play both and you have played two genuinely different rounds without leaving the area.
In town means in town. You trade the lake and the resort seclusion for convenience and a local crowd, Ruidoso regulars mixed with visitors staying in the village. The conditioning and the budget are a step down from the Inn, fairly obviously, and a links concept at altitude will always be a translation rather than the real coastal thing.
But as a second course it is close to ideal, different in character, cheaper, easier to get on, and honest about what it is. Plenty of visitors play the famous resort course once and Sierra Blanca twice, and the math in that decision is sound.
3Alto Lakes Golf and Country Club
Alto Lakes is the private club up in Alto, in the pines above town, serving a community of second homes and retirees who built their summers around exactly this: high, cool, quiet golf among the trees. For its members the ranking is upside down. Their course is the one they play weekly, at their pace, with nobody's bachelor weekend in front of them.
For a ranking anyone can use, though, access is the whole issue. A private club a non member cannot book finishes third in a three course town no matter how pleasant its fairways are, and the available evidence says pleasant rather than exceptional: solid mountain golf, well kept for its members, without the lake setting of the Inn or the distinct concept of Sierra Blanca.
That is not a dismissal. Every mountain town needs a club like Alto Lakes to anchor its golf community through the winters. It is simply not the reason a visitor drives up the mountain. The reason sits by the lake, catching the last of the light, with Sierra Blanca's white peak over it all.