Washington’s 10 Best Public Golf Courses

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We asked experts around the state — including golfers like you — to rank their favorite Evergreen State tracks. Here are 10 courses scoring big with our panelists in 2013.

Each spring, the major magazines release their annual ranking of America’s top golf courses, both public and otherwise. Chambers Bay has become a lock, and sometime we’ll have one or two more pop up in the bottom third. But typically, that’s it — 2-3 local tracks, and 97-98 others that, with maybe a handful of exceptions, most of us are never going to play.

Washington’s 10 Best Public Golf Courses:
How’d We Do It?

And for us, reading about great courses we can’t play — either because of membership rules, or proximity to our part of the country — is about as much fun as watching an approach shot hit the pin and ricochet off into a greenside bunker.

That’s why we’ve chosen this, our 25th issue of Cascade Golfer, to debut our own golf course rankings made up entirely of tracks that you could tee it up on tomorrow morning if you so chose — all within the state borders, and every one open to the public.

So with apologies to Aldarra, TPC Snoqualmie Ridge, and the other great private courses out there, this top-10 is for Cascade Golfers only, and represents not just the courses we can play, but the courses we can’t wait to play.

In 2012, we held a year-long contest to crown the state’s best course, seeding 32 courses into a bracket and letting CG readers pick the winners in each matchup. The contest proved to be one of the most popular features we’ve ever had, breaking traffic records on on CascadeGolfer.com, generating emails, letters and phone calls, and resulting in over 20,000 total votes.

This year, we’ve blown up the forced limitations of the bracket and let our voting panel choose from any public or semi-private golf course within Washington borders. Our panel represents a diverse group of golfers, golf writers, photographers and other industry experts, each bringing a unique point of view — men and women, recent college graduates and retirees, representing all parts of the state. Most of these individuals stake their very livelihood on knowing as much as possible about our state’s top courses, making them the perfect committee to determine our first-ever course rankings.

Instructions were left intentionally vague — rather than box voters in with a list of specifics to rate, we told them simply to vote with their hearts for the 10 golf courses they felt represented the best in daily-fee golf that Washington state has to offer. After combining their rankings using the formula described on page 31, we extracted the top-nine vote-getters, then let our readers choose the top-10’s final honoree from a list of the next-highest scorers.

Perhaps most notable in the final voting was that only two courses — No. 1 Chambers Bay and No. 3 Wine Valley — received even a single first-place vote. In all, 22 courses appeared on at least one ballot, a testament to the incredible depth of quality courses in Washington state.

The courses selected this year to Cascade Golfer’s “10 Best” list include tracks played on the shores of Puget Sound, across the fertile hills of Central and Eastern Washington, and among the Cascade Mountain peaks. There are courses with greens fees under $50, and courses with greens fees over $100; destination gems, and others right around the corner.

In other words, they are a perfect microcosm of what makes Washington state the greatest place in America to be a daily-fee golfer. Now, let’s just keep that our little secret.

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