Northern Michigan

The golf season in Northern Michigan runs five months, and that constraint is the destination's defining characteristic and its greatest asset. From late May through early October, the corridor between Traverse City and Petoskey delivers playing conditions that compete with anywhere in the country: firm turf, cool mornings in the mid-50s, afternoons in the upper 70s, low humidity, and daylight that stretches past nine in midsummer. The courses are maintained with the intensity of properties that know their window is finite. The result is a concentration of quality across a 100-mile corridor that has quietly become one of the strongest golf regions in America.

The geography explains the architecture. Lake Michigan's eastern shoreline provides 200-foot bluffs, sandy soil, and persistent wind. Inland, dense pine and hardwood cover rolling terrain with natural sand deposits that rival anything in the world's better sand-belt regions. Architects have been drawn to this raw material for decades, and the best of them have produced courses that would not exist in this form anywhere else.