Town Guides / Michigan

The Traverse City Golf Guide

The Bear has a reputation that arrives before you do. It was Nicklaus's hardest Michigan course when it opened, and golfers have been repeating that line on the drive up ever since, half proud and half nervous. Around Traverse City the setting argues the other way: cherry orchards, bay views, summer towns built for long evenings. The trip works because both things are true. The golf can be severe. The days around it do not have to be.

Base at Grand Traverse Resort, which holds three of the five anchor courses here, and sequence them by difficulty rather than by habit. Start with the Spruce Run Course. Every hard trip needs a loosener, a first round that gets the travel out of your swing without charging full price for mistakes, and Spruce Run fills that role in the resort rotation. Play it on arrival day, keep the bets small, and let the group find its putting stroke before the main event.

The Bear is day two, not day one

Play The Bear Course on the first full morning, from a set of tees chosen by honesty rather than by the story you want to tell later. The course's reputation was earned against good players playing it from the back. A visiting group that insists on the tips is not being brave, it is being slow, and it will spend the back nine apologizing to the groups behind. Moved up to the right yardage, the Bear becomes what it should be: a stern, handsome test in a beautiful part of Michigan, hard enough that a par feels earned and a birdie gets remembered. Cherry orchards and the bay soften the trip, not the course. That was the deal from the start.

The Wolverine Course is the second feature round, and it matters that you play it after the Bear rather than before. Groups that play the Wolverine first spend the round looking over their shoulder at the famous sibling. Played second, it gets judged on its own day, which is how a resort's rotation should work. If the group has a fourth round in it, play the Wolverine again before you repeat the Bear. Variety is the whole point of a three course resort.

Then leave the property. LochenHeath Golf Club, across the bay side of town, is the standalone name on this list, the round that takes the trip out of the resort bubble and into the local golf scene. Check its access arrangements well ahead, because it does not run on the resort's tee sheet, and build the day around the drive. Elmbrook Golf Course is the town option at the other end of the scale, the lower key local round that suits a departure morning or a group whose budget took the Bear's green fee personally. Every good trip needs one round priced and paced like real life.

Stay long enough for the town, too. Traverse City in summer is built around the bay and the orchards, and a golf trip that never slows down for either has used the place as a parking lot with views. Put one evening on the water and one stop at an orchard stand between rounds. The Bear will still be hard the next morning. You will just be in a better mood to take the beating it has been promising since the drive up.

Timing a northern Michigan trip

Summer is peak for a reason: the bay is warm enough to look at without wincing, the orchards are in business, and the evenings run long. Late spring and early fall cut the crowds and the rates, at the price of cooler air off the water. Book the Bear when you book the rooms, because the famous name fills first in every season.

The mistake in Traverse City is letting one famous course eat the trip. Golfers fly in, play the Bear twice, shoot two numbers they do not want to discuss, and leave believing the town is a bruiser with nice views. Play it once, properly, at the right tees and the right hour. Then let the rest of the bench, the resort rotation, the bay side detour, and one honest local round show you the place the orchard roads were hiding.