Golf in Colstrip

Colstrip is a Rosebud County energy town, purpose-built to serve the coal mines and power plants that generate electricity for the Pacific Northwest grid. Ponderosa Butte Golf Course provides the community with a recreational outlet in a town whose character is inseparable from its industrial function. The surrounding badlands and buttes give the course a landscape that is unmistakably eastern Montana — wide, dry, dramatic in its own subdued way. The ponderosa pine ridges that punctuate the local coulees provide occasional shade and the visual variety that flat-terrain courses typically lack. The town's grid layout and company-housing origins are still visible in the streets surrounding the course.