# The Best Golf Courses in White Bear Lake

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-white-bear-lake-mn/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Minnesota


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The lake comes first here. White Bear Lake is a sailing town northeast of St. Paul, the kind of place where summer traffic means boats as much as cars, and its golf sits out on a peninsula in that water. You do not stumble into this golf scene. You get invited into it, or you drive past the gates and wonder.

That is the honest shape of this ranking. White Bear Lake has two courses worth arguing about, and both are private clubs, which means the list is short and the argument is really about one question: how far ahead is the famous one? We score the golf itself first, then the day around it, then what access actually costs you. On those terms the order is not close at the top, and pretending otherwise to pad out a list of five would be a lie. This is the whole bench. Two courses, one clear winner, and a second club that most towns in Minnesota would happily take as their first.

## 1White Bear Yacht Club

White Bear Yacht Club is Ross and Watson on a lake peninsula, and it is Minnesota's most argued-over golden age course. The argument is partly about credit. Two architects of that era touched this ground, and golfers who care about such things have spent decades sorting out who did what, hole by hole, bunker by bunker. That a membership club in a lake town still provokes that argument tells you most of what you need to know about the golf.

What settles the ranking is simpler than the attribution fight. The course uses its peninsula the way golden age courses were supposed to use land: the water shapes the strategy instead of decorating it, the ground moves, and the holes ask different questions as the round turns back toward the clubhouse. It plays like a course built by men who walked the site and argued with each other, which, on the evidence of the long-running debate, is roughly what happened. The architecture still holds up against anything in the state.

The concession is access, and it is a real one. This is a private yacht club with a golf course, not a resort with a tee sheet. If you do not know a member, you are reading about it rather than playing it, and no amount of ranking enthusiasm changes that. None of that moves it off the top spot. It is No. 1 by a distance that the second course on this list would probably concede over drinks.

## 2Dellwood Country Club

Dellwood sits just outside the town line in the village that shares its name, and it is the other half of this small golf world: a private club course in the classic Minnesota parkland mould, tree-lined and orderly, the sort of place where the test is keeping the ball in the short grass and out of trouble you can see coming. Where White Bear Yacht Club gets the peninsula and the history argument, Dellwood gets the weekly game. Members play it constantly, know every bounce, and defend it the way members everywhere defend the course they actually live on.

Fair's fair: on an ordinary Tuesday, with no guest day and no occasion, Dellwood may deliver the more relaxed round of the two, and its members are not pining for a redesign or a famous name on the scorecard. But a ranking has to reward the golf first, and Dellwood does not have the land, the architecture pedigree, or the long argument trailing behind it. It is a good club course standing next to a great one, which is a harder neighbourhood than most No. 2 courses on this site have to survive.

Two courses, both behind gates, in a town that does its summer on the water. Get the invitation to the peninsula if one ever comes. That is the round people here are still arguing about a hundred years on, and arguments like that are usually the surest sign the golf is real.

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