# The Best Golf Courses in Salt Lake City

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-salt-lake-city-ut/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Utah


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

Salt Lake City built its golf into the foothills before it built much else up there. Bonneville, a city course from 1929, sits above the Capitol in the benchland east of downtown, and nearly a century later the best public golf in the city is still a Depression-era municipal with the whole valley spread out below it.

That is the character of golf in this city: a deep public system, benches and canyons doing the work that architects do elsewhere, and one private club above it all. Mountain Dell sits in Parley's Canyon on the interstate, golf you literally drive through on the way to Park City. We rank the golf first, then the day, then access. The private club wins. The 1929 muni comes closer than it should.

## 1Salt Lake Country Club

Salt Lake Country Club is the state's establishment course, the private test against which Utah golf has measured itself for generations. In a city with genuinely good public golf, the club still separates itself the way old clubs in state capitals do: the strongest membership, the deepest competitive tradition, and a course that members never tire of because it was built to be played daily for a lifetime.

The concession writes itself. Private, established, and not apologising for either, in a city whose public system gives most golfers little reason to care. It takes first on golf. It would take last on availability, and both facts belong on the page.

## 2Bonneville Golf Course

Bonneville is a 1929 city course in the foothills above the Capitol, and it is the soul of Salt Lake golf. Benchland holes, sidehill lies, views from the Avenues across the whole grid of the city to the Oquirrhs. Municipal golf this characterful is rare anywhere; in a state capital, where the muni could have been a flat field by the airport, it feels like a civic gift that keeps giving.

Why not first? Because the country club's test is deeper across 18 holes, and this list scores golf before romance. But understand the margin. If we ranked by the round we would most want on a free Tuesday, Bonneville wins going away, and half of Salt Lake's golfers just nodded.

## 3Mountain Dell Golf Course Lake Course

Mountain Dell sits in Parley's Canyon on the interstate, which makes it the most-seen golf in Utah: every driver heading up I-80 to Park City passes through its scenery. The Lake Course is the stronger half of a 36-hole canyon complex, golf in a mountain corridor where the holes thread the canyon floor and the elevation does quiet work on your yardages.

Canyon golf has limits. The ground dictates the holes more than any designer could, and the interstate is never fully out of earshot. Third place reflects that: a good course in a dramatic corridor, behind a great club and a great muni.

## 4Glendale Golf Course

Glendale carries the west side's everyday game, the accessible public round on the valley floor, flat where the others climb. It is the least distinguished test in this ranking and one of the most used courses in the city, which is its own kind of standing.

Fourth of four, and Salt Lake is lucky that its fourth-best option still serves thousands of rounds a year. Depth is a civic achievement, even when the depth chart's bottom rung is ordinary golf honestly played.

From Bonneville's bench at dusk the city grid lights up below, square mile after square mile, and the 1929 muni is still the best seat in town. Salt Lake built that on purpose. It shows.

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