Golf in Minnesota

Minnesota golf occupies a paradox: a state with a short season of five or six months that nonetheless ranks among the most passionate golf cultures in America. The 10,000 lakes that define the landscape are also the organizing principle of the golf infrastructure: courses clustered at resort destinations, courses framing lakeside communities, courses named for the waters they border. When the ice goes out in April and the last frost retreats in May, Minnesotans play as though making up for lost time, crowding tee sheets from dawn until the long summer twilight fades near ten o'clock.

The golf landscape divides naturally by region. The Twin Cities metro anchors the state's largest golf market with the greatest variety, from TPC Twin Cities in Blaine, host of the PGA Tour's 3M Open, to the historic Minikahda Club (1916 U.S. Open), to Hazeltine National in Chaska, where the Ryder Cup, PGA Championship, and multiple U.S. Opens have defined the national conversation about championship golf. Interlachen Country Club in Edina sits in this same pantheon, the venue where Bobby Jones completed his legendary Grand Slam in 1930.

North of the metro, the Brainerd Lakes Area functions as Minnesota's resort golf capital. Madden's On Gull Lake, Cragun's Resort, Breezy Point, and Grand View Resort have built a multi-course destination landscape that rivals any resort corridor in the upper Midwest. The density of quality courses within a short drive of each other makes the Brainerd region a natural multi-day golf destination.

The Iron Range in northeastern Minnesota offers golf built on the landscape left by open-pit mining and the boreal forest that reclaims the margins. Giant's Ridge in Aurora has developed well-regarded courses on this remarkable terrain, attracting golfers who combine a Range visit with a trip to the Boundary Waters or the North Shore of Lake Superior. Superior National at Lutsen brings elevation and views to the Highway 61 corridor, where Lake Superior accompanies every round.

Southeastern Minnesota's Driftless Area (the region that escaped glaciation) offers topographic drama unavailable elsewhere in the state. The limestone bluffs above the Mississippi River near Red Wing, Lake City, and Winona, the Root River karst country in Fillmore County, and the wooded terrain of Houston County give courses in this corner a character that has no equivalent on the lake plains or the prairie.

Southwestern and western Minnesota course through agricultural terrain where courses in small communities function as civic institutions, connecting scattered rural populations in a landscape of grain elevators, wind turbines, and the Red River Valley's extraordinary flatness.

Minnesota's reliable golf window runs May through October. What fills it is genuine enthusiasm: a state that produces serious golfers who make up in frequency what the calendar denies in months.