# The Best Golf Courses in Walla Walla

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

Walla Walla is wine country now, a small eastern Washington town where the tasting rooms outnumber everything and the wheat fields run to the Blues. The golf arrived at the same conclusion the wineries did. The land out here, dry, rolling, open to the sky, is naturally suited to a certain kind of course, and the best course in town is the one that trusted the land instead of fighting it.

Three courses make up the bench: a modern links-style public course that has carried the town's golf reputation for years, a small-city veterans municipal, and the private country club. The order below is not particularly close at the top. The interesting argument in Walla Walla is not who is first. It is how far first has pulled away from the rest of the town.

## 1Wine Valley Golf Club

Wine Valley is Dan Hixson, links-style, in wheat country, and it has been Golfweek's top Washington public course for years running, an honor worth pausing on. Washington has famous public golf, including a U.S. Open venue on Puget Sound. A course outside Walla Walla holding a ranking like that, year after year, is not a local boast. It is a sustained national judgment.

Hixson's design trusts width, firm ground, and angles. The course plays over open, rolling terrain where the wind is a real player and the ball runs, which in irrigated, tree-lined Washington is a genuine change of diet. You can play ground shots here. You can pick a side of a wide fairway for a reason and be rewarded or exposed for the choice. That is links golf translated honestly into wheat country rather than copied in costume.

The concession is isolation, in two senses. Wine Valley sits outside town, a destination by itself, and a round there is the whole plan for the day rather than a piece of it. The spare setting will also divide golfers. If your idea of beauty is tall trees and a lake, this open, golden ground may look empty to you. We would argue the emptiness is the point, and the rankings agree with us, but the golfer who wants shade will not be converted.

No. 1, and the gap matters. Wine Valley is not just the best course in Walla Walla. It is the reason a golfer planning an eastern Washington trip puts Walla Walla on the itinerary at all, ahead of the wine, which in this town is saying something.

## 2Walla Walla Country Club

The country club is the town's private golf: an established members' course serving Walla Walla's old families and its newer wine money alike, traditional in character and kept to the standard a small-city club can sustain when its membership actually cares.

Second place here comes with a large asterisk shaped like Wine Valley. The club's golf is good, honest members' golf, a tier below the public course up the road in ambition and in test. That inversion, the public course outclassing the private club, is rare in American golf towns and Walla Walla should enjoy it.

The concession is the familiar one. The club is private, so its second place helps only golfers with a way in. For everybody else, Walla Walla golf is Wine Valley and the veterans course, which, given Wine Valley, is no hardship at all.

## 3Veterans Memorial Golf Course Walla Walla

The veterans memorial course is the town's municipal round, named for service and run for the community, the affordable everyday option that keeps Walla Walla's local game healthy while the famous course draws the visitors.

It finishes third because the golf is modest: a straightforward layout on a municipal budget, the kind of course you play for the company and the exercise and the price, not for holes you will describe at dinner. Conditioning varies with the season and the city's resources, as municipal conditioning does.

None of that diminishes its place in the town. Every golf town needs a course where a kid can start and a retiree can walk nine without thinking about money, and Walla Walla's happens to carry a memorial name that suits a town with a VA hospital and deep military roots. Third on the golf, and the town is better for having it. Play Wine Valley for the test. Tip your cap here on the way past.

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