# The Best Golf Courses in Sedona

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-sedona-az/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Arizona


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

Every course in Sedona plays in front of the same backdrop, and the backdrop is unfair competition. Red rock formations ring the town, the light changes them by the hour, and golfers spend half of every round looking past the golf at the scenery. The local joke is that the rocks do the marketing, and Sedona Golf Resort's 10th tee, the most photographed in Arizona after the TPC 16th, is the proof: a tee box whose fame rests almost entirely on what stands behind the green.

Three courses make the bench here, and they split into the private prize, the public resort round, and the old local club. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and Sedona produces the series' strangest result: the best course is the one almost nobody reading this can play, and the course the town is famous for is not it.

## 1Seven Canyons Golf Club

Seven Canyons is the private enclave in the red rocks west of town, a course routed through a box canyon landscape so dramatic that the golf had to be good just to avoid being an afterthought. It is good. The holes work through the canyon country with a sense of seclusion no other course in Sedona can sell, because no other course in Sedona owns a canyon. Members play in near silence, in scenery that most golfers only see on the drive between courses.

The concession is access, total and unapologetic. Seven Canyons is private, estimates put the cost of membership well beyond casual reach, and we say estimates because the club does not publish figures. For the traveling golfer it might as well be on the moon. We rank it first anyway. A ranking that demotes the best course in town for being private is lying to you politely, and there is enough polite lying in golf media already.

## 2Sedona Golf Resort

This is the Sedona round the world actually plays: a public resort course climbing through the red rock country south of town, every hole framed by formations with names, and that 10th tee waiting in the middle of the round like a scheduled photo stop. The golf itself is solid resort work, elevated tees, big views, a layout that understands its customers came for the setting and gives them a fair test inside it.

The honest knock is that the scenery outperforms the architecture, and a stern critic playing it blindfolded to the views would grade it a notch lower. Nobody plays it blindfolded. Setting is a scored category here, Sedona Golf Resort maxes it, and second place in a three-course town with a private club at the top means this is, functionally, the No. 1 public course in Sedona. Book the late tee time. The rocks at golden hour are the whole argument.

## 3Oakcreek Country Club

Oakcreek is the old guard, the traditional club course in the Village of Oak Creek, tree-lined and walkable in a town where the other golf is all spectacle and elevation. It has served local members and knowing visitors for decades, and its charms are the unfashionable ones: shade, pace, a routing that feels like a golf course first and a postcard second.

Third is the right spot and Oakcreek's regulars would probably accept it with a shrug. What they know, and this ranking should say out loud, is that on a windy day when the resort course is full of photographers, the quiet round under the trees at Oakcreek is the smartest money in the Sedona area.

Three courses, one backdrop. Come for the rocks, argue about whether the private canyon or the famous photograph deserves your envy, and tee off late at least once, when the red goes to rust and the whole town looks lit from inside.

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