Town Rankings / Idaho

The Best Golf Courses in Twin Falls

Twin Falls has the best piece of golf scenery in Idaho that most golfers have never heard of, and it is a hole in the ground. The Snake River Canyon cuts the town's northern edge a few hundred feet deep, and one of its courses plays down inside that cut, under the Perrine Bridge, where base jumpers legally fall past your backswing on their way to the river. Golf above the canyon rim is pleasant high desert golf. Golf inside the canyon is something else entirely.

Three courses make the list: the canyon course, the town's municipal, and a private club. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in Twin Falls the day and the golf point at the same course so hard that the only real argument is about the order of the other two.

1Canyon Springs Golf Club

Canyon Springs plays in the Snake River Canyon, and there is no honest way to rank it anywhere but first. The canyon gives the course what no architect can bill for: scale, drama, and a setting that changes the temperature, the wind, and the light as you drop into it. Springs run out of the canyon walls, the river moves through the bottom of your round, and the Perrine Bridge hangs over the whole production carrying highway traffic and the occasional falling human. Courses spend fortunes manufacturing a signature. This one was issued a canyon.

The concession is that scenery is doing heavy lifting, and a strict architecture panel would mark Canyon Springs down for it. Hole by hole, stripped of the canyon, the design is good regional golf rather than great golf. We accept the deduction and rank it first anyway, because golf is played in places, not on diagrams, and this place is singular in American golf. There is exactly one course in the country where your round shares airspace with base jumpers. It is this one, and it is in Twin Falls, Idaho.

2Blue Lakes Country Club

Blue Lakes is the town's private club, named for the blue lakes that sit in the canyon country near the river, and it is the members' answer to the canyon course's public fame. Private golf in a town the size of Twin Falls lives or dies on the membership's commitment, and Blue Lakes has held its place in the town's social and golf life for generations of local families. The golf is a step up in conditioning and quiet from the municipal option, in a setting that shares the canyon country's drama at one remove.

Second, with the standing private concession: most golfers in Twin Falls will experience Blue Lakes as a name and a gate. Estimates of what membership costs stay modest by coastal standards, because this is Idaho, but modest is not open. Between the two members' arguments, best course in town or best setting in town, the club settles for best kept, and in a small city that is a title with real value.

3Twin Falls Golf Club

The municipal course is the town's everyday golf, the public round that keeps the game democratic in a place where the other two options are a tourist draw and a private club. It does the unglamorous work: leagues, lessons, high school teams, retirees at dawn. Twin Falls golfers who learned the game learned it here or at the canyon, and the muni's share of that teaching is larger than its ranking suggests.

Third on the golf, and the concession is ours to make this time. A ranking that only counted rounds actually played by actual Twin Falls residents might well put the municipal course higher, because volume is a kind of verdict. We rank on the golf first, and on the golf the muni is the simplest test of the three. Simple, public, and busy is a fine thing for a course to be. It is just not a thing that wins this list.

Evening in the canyon, the bridge goes gold, the jumpers pack their rigs, and the last groups at Canyon Springs play up toward the rim in long shadow. Twin Falls keeps its best secret at the bottom of a hole in the ground.