# The Best Golf Courses in Snoqualmie

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-snoqualmie-wa/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Washington


A leading golf course in Washington. Photo: Atomic Taco from Seattle, WA, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Two courses, two altitudes, two entirely different ideas of what a round is for. Up on the ridge, at about 600 feet, sits a Nicklaus tournament course built for television. Down on the valley floor, by the river, sits the local course where the valley has played its golf for generations. Snoqualmie does not need a long list. It needs an honest account of a short one, so here it is: this ranking has two entries, because two is what exists, and the fight between them is really a fight about what golf in a small Cascade foothills town should be.

The ridge course wins on golf and it is not a debate. The valley course wins on almost everything else a local would name: price, pace, belonging, Tuesday afternoons. We score the golf first, then the day, then what it costs you. By that order the result below writes itself, but the second course on this list deserves better than a shrug, and it will get it.

## 1TPC Snoqualmie Ridge

TPC Snoqualmie Ridge is Nicklaus at 600 feet with the Champions Tour's Boeing Classic on its calendar, which means the course is examined every year by players who have won majors and by television cameras that do not flatter weak holes. It survives the examination. That is the core of the case.

The Nicklaus design language is all over it: demanding carries, greens that ask you to commit to a side, trouble placed exactly where a bailout wants to go. Set on the ridge above the valley, the course also gets the views and the elevation changes the floor below cannot offer. A round up here feels like an event even on a quiet weekday, partly the conditioning, partly the sense of playing somewhere built to be watched.

The concessions are real and there are two. First, this is private club golf, TPC-branded and member-centered, so the public golfer's access is limited and the day costs what tournament venues cost. Second, the Nicklaus test at full stretch can beat up the ordinary player. The course was built with elite golf in its brief, and a 15-handicap having a bad driving day will feel every bit of that brief by the turn.

None of it displaces the course from No. 1. It is one of the strongest tournament venues in the state, it sits in a town of two courses, and the gap in pure golf between first and second here is as large as any in Washington. If you get the invitation or the tee time, you take it, and you bring your best driving day.

## 2Snoqualmie Falls Golf Course

Down on the valley floor, the Falls course is the local, and we mean that as praise with specifics attached. This is the course the valley actually uses: league nights, family rounds, kids learning the game, old friends playing the same match they have played for years. It is walkable in spirit and in fact, priced for repetition rather than occasion, and woven into the daily life of Snoqualmie in a way the ridge course, for all its quality, will never be.

On the golf itself, the honest verdict is that the Falls is an ordinary test. It will not stretch a strong player, its conditioning follows a local-course budget, and playing it the week after the Ridge would make the contrast unkind. That is the concession, and it is decisive for the ranking. We are ranking courses, not community value.

But understand what second place means in a two-course town. It means this is the other half of Snoqualmie golf, the half with the higher round count and the deeper roots. The Ridge is the course Snoqualmie shows the world each summer on television. The Falls is the course Snoqualmie plays. A town is lucky to have one of those. Snoqualmie, split between a ridge and a river, has both.

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