Town Rankings / Oregon

The Best Golf Courses in Salem

Salem is Oregon's capital and its quietest golf town, a Willamette Valley city of government workers, oaks, and rain that arrives sideways in November. Nobody flies in to play golf in Salem. Which is exactly why its bench is worth a straight look: a private club with a real designer, a public course from 1927 that the city has kept alive through every budget cycle since, and two more rounds filling out a market that serves locals first and visitors as an afterthought.

We rank it as it stands, golf first, then the day, then access. Salem will not win any statewide argument. Inside its own borders, though, the order is more interesting than the city's reputation suggests.

1Illahe Hills Country Club

Illahe Hills is the private club in south Salem, and its calling card is the designer: Gene Bates, who built it as a modern test in a valley full of courses that predate him. Bates gave Salem a course with movement, water in play where the creeks run, and greens with enough contour to hold a club championship's attention. In a town of modest golf ambitions, Illahe Hills is the one course that was built to be taken seriously.

The concession is that taken seriously is a relative term here. Illahe Hills is not chasing Eugene Country Club, an hour south, and its members, state workers and local business people in the main, are not asking it to. It wins this list because within Salem it has the most complete design and the highest ceiling, the course a good player would choose for a serious game. First in Salem is a smaller crown than first in Bend or Portland. It is still earned.

2Salem Golf Club

Salem Golf Club is the 1927 public course in the south Salem oaks, and it is the sentimental favorite of this list, which we are resisting only partly successfully. Ninety odd years of city golf live in this routing: big oak trees, honest holes, a layout from the era when public golf was built by people who expected it to last, maintained through decades when plenty of cities let theirs go. The oaks are the architecture now. They narrow the questions and shade the whole round.

It ranks second because Illahe Hills asks more of a good player, and pretending a beloved muni outguns a purpose built private test would be flattery, not criticism. But here is the honest flip side: Salem Golf Club is the course on this list we would tell a visitor to play. It is public, it is cheap, it is 1927, and it is the most Salem round available at any price. Second on the card, first in the town's affections, and both rankings are correct.

3Creekside Golf Club Salem

Creekside is the modern public option in south Salem, a course built for the daily fee era with a friendlier setup than Salem Golf Club's oak corridors and a clubhouse built for weddings as much as for golf. That dual purpose shows in the round: pleasant, playable, a little of its edge sanded off in favor of the event business, which in fairness is what keeps modern public golf alive.

Third is a fair landing. Creekside does not have the 1927 bones of the course above it or the design ambition of the private club, and its best holes would not displace either one's best holes. What it has is reliability, the round you book when the group has mixed handicaps and one afternoon. Salem needs that course. It just ranks where it ranks.

4McNary Golf Club Keizer

McNary is in Keizer, the city stitched to Salem's north side, and it plays the role of the neighborhood club: a semi private course in a residential setting where the regulars know every bounce and the golf is steady, social, and priced for frequency. Keizer counts as Salem for golf purposes the way suburbs count everywhere, as part of the same weekly round.

It finishes fourth because its ambitions are the smallest on the list and it would be the first to say so. McNary is not trying to host your serious game; it is hosting its members' four hundredth. There is a dignity in that, and a ranking that cannot see it is not worth much. But the golf, hole for hole, is the slightest test here, and slightest goes last.

Rain coming in over the oaks at Salem Golf Club, a 1927 routing doing its work in the wet, is this city's whole golf argument in one picture: nothing famous, nothing fake, still standing.