Town Rankings / Idaho

The Best Golf Courses in Sandpoint

Sandpoint sits on the north end of Lake Pend Oreille, about as far up Idaho as a town gets before Canada starts making suggestions, and it has exactly two golf courses that matter for this ranking. One is a Jack Nicklaus design on the Pack River that belongs on state lists. The other is a nine hole town course run through the Elks. A ranking with two entries should be honest about what it is: less a contest than a portrait of how golf works in a small northern town, where the game exists at the two ends of the money spectrum and not much in the middle.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Apply that here and the order takes about four seconds. Apply access first and the order flips, which is its own kind of truth about Sandpoint. Both truths are in the write ups below, because a two course town deserves the whole argument, not a coin flip.

1The Idaho Club

The Idaho Club is Nicklaus on the Pack River, a private course cut through forest and wetland west of town, and it is the only course on this list that would hold its own in a ranking of the whole state. Nicklaus design in this era means a demanding, strategic test that asks you to think your way around water and timber, and the setting, river bottom under big mountains, gives the architecture a stage most private clubs in the Northwest would trade for. The club's modern history carries a scar: a fire destroyed the clubhouse and the rebuild that followed reset the place, which gives the current era of the club a defined starting line.

The concession is access, and it is a wall, not a fence. This is private golf in a remote corner of a remote state, which means nearly every golfer reading this ranking will never play the best course in Sandpoint. Estimates of membership cost are beside the point; the real price is knowing somebody. We rank it first because the ranking starts with the golf, and the golf is not close. But it is worth recording that Sandpoint's No. 1 is, for practical purposes, a rumor with a maintenance budget.

2Sandpoint Elks Golf Course

The Elks course is the town nine, and the town nine is a sacred category in American golf that rankings like this one handle badly if they handle it on architecture. Nine holes, run by the local Elks lodge, priced for the people who live here, full of the golfers who actually constitute Sandpoint's golf population across a summer. This is where rounds happen after work, where kids and retirees share tee times, where the game is a habit instead of an event.

Second here means second by design and first by attendance, and the write up should not pretend otherwise. The Elks cannot examine a good player the way the Nicklaus course can, and nobody associated with it would claim otherwise after a beer. What it can do, and does, is keep golf public in a town whose famous course is locked. Take the Elks away and Sandpoint golf is a private club and a lake view. Keep it, and the town has a game.

Winter comes early this far north and stays late, so the season at both courses is a sprint. The Nicklaus course gets the photographs and the Elks gets the town, and in Sandpoint, for most of the people who play, the town is the point.