Mind, Body, Spirit: 15 Public Golf Trips, and Why You Should Take Them Alone

Tobacco Road looks like nothing else in North Carolina golf. The course is cut from the orange sand of a former quarry, and the club’s own pitch is blunt: “Some golf courses ask you to follow the rules. Tobacco Road asks you to think differently.”

It means it. There is no out of bounds anywhere on the property, and Local Rule No. 1 says every bunker is a waste area, so you can ground your club in all of it. The approach to the 9th is blind to a plateau green. The par-5 13th, the club’s own Road hole, finishes at what it calls a “blind bathtub green.” The 4th and 11th are mirror-image cape holes, the 16th green has three tiers, and the 18th asks for a blind drive. You spend the whole round deciding what you are looking at before you decide what to hit.

Make it a Strantz trip. Tot Hill Farm, about 50 minutes away, is the course he built on horseback, riding his horse Scout with his dogs following along. Between the two you get the purest dose of one architect’s imagination available to the public.

Bethpage is the head game. It is a state park course that has hosted two U.S. Opens, a PGA Championship and the 2025 Ryder Cup, and before you hit a shot the state tells you, on a sign by the first tee, that you probably shouldn’t: “The Black Course Is An Extremely Difficult Course Which We Recommend Only For Highly Skilled Golfers.”

What makes it a Mind trip is managing yourself for four-plus hours on a major-championship course, on foot, with no cart to rest in and big bunkers waiting on every miss. Getting there is part of it too. Non-New Yorkers book five days out at 7 p.m., one Black round per 28 days, and the most dedicated still sleep in the parking lot for a walk-up time. GOLF.com’s Josh Sens described golfers “willing to spend the night in their cars.”

We wrote up our own trip in our New York golf trip. The short version: the green fee is the bargain of the list, and the course makes you earn every bit of it.

If you want a course that teaches you golf architecture while you play it, this is the one. Old Macdonald is Tom Doak and Jim Urbina’s tribute to C.B. Macdonald, and it is built from the template holes he brought to America: Sahara, Biarritz, Redan, Alps, Punchbowl and more, each one a classic idea about how to defend a green.

The resort’s hole guide names them all. The 3rd, Sahara, is a blind tee shot over a dune. The 8th, Biarritz, has a green split by a deep swale (“A two-putt on this hole is a feat of its own”). The 12th is a 237-yard Redan. At the 16th, Alps, you play blind over a hill and ring a bell when you’ve putted out so the group behind knows it’s clear. The greens are huge, so the thinking doesn’t stop when you reach them.

Bandon is walking only, with caddies who know every template by heart. We footnoted the resort in our PNW trip; Old Mac is the course we’d build a whole Bandon trip around.

Nine holes in a Tennessee valley, a shed for a clubhouse, and some of the boldest green contours in American golf. Rob Collins and Tad King built Sweetens Cove on the site of an old course, and the ground does things you don’t expect. Holes 3 and 6 share one huge green that rises about 20 feet from end to end.

The 4th is called King, after the late local golfer King Oehmig (no relation to Tad), who suggested a Himalayas hole. It plays anywhere from 90 to more than 200 yards off two huge tees set sideways to the line of play, into a 20,000-square-foot green. Play the nine again and it’s a different course, which is the point of the all-day pass.

The house rules are the best on this list: “Wear whatever you want and bring your dog if you want to.” Ran Morrissett, quoted by the club, put it best: “If you leave [Sweetens Cove] smiling, don’t panic, golf is supposed to be fun.”

Landmand is Danish for farmer, and the course sits on 588 acres of the Andersen family’s Nebraska land in the Loess Hills. There are almost no trees and no water. What there is, is width: fairways more than 100 yards across and greens averaging more than 14,000 square feet, with windsocks instead of flags.

That width is the puzzle. With that much room, nothing tells you where to aim, so every shot is a choice of angle into greens with enormous slopes. Rob Collins described the site as “this very raw, natural, tumbling landscape,” and from the 12th tee you can see eight to ten other holes at once.

Getting on is its own test. The Wall Street Journal called it America’s toughest tee time, and all 11,000 tee times for 2026 sold out in 45 minutes. It’s also fully public, with no members and no corporate outings. Its FAQ has the best line on this list: “Walk 18? We’ll buy your first beer.”

Erin Hills is the strictest walk on this list. It is walking only, and there are no push carts or pull carts, so you either carry your own bag or take a caddie. From the back tees it runs 7,715 yards, and it sprawls across 652 acres of glacial land shaped by the Kettle Moraine.

The course sells its range of holes as “from a terrifying 140 yard hole to a brute of 620,” and it hosted the 2017 U.S. Open and the 2025 U.S. Women’s Open. The fescue is long and golden, the walks between holes are real, and the club tells you to plan on four hours and 55 minutes.

It is also one of the few places on this list built for someone traveling alone. The Lodge has seven single rooms out of eleven, steps from the first tee, and dining is limited to people with a tee time or a room, so the bar is full of people who just walked the same course you did.

The Straits course is the longest course on this list: 7,790 yards from the back tees, rated 77.2 with a slope of 152, along two miles of rugged Lake Michigan shoreline. It is walking only, and the wind off the lake decides how long it plays on any given day.

Pete Dye filled it with roughly a thousand bunkers, by Golf Digest’s count. The holes have names that tell you what’s coming. The 7th, Shipwreck, goes down to the shoreline. The 13th, Cliff Hanger, has a green on the cliff edge. The 15th starts a four-hole closing stretch the resort calls among the toughest in championship golf, and the 18th is called Dyeabolical.

Dye, asked about it, said: “Naah, this course is popcorn! But, sometimes people choke on popcorn.” It hosted three PGA Championships and the 2021 Ryder Cup.

Reviewers who have walked every course at Bandon keep naming Trails as the hardest walk, and it doesn’t even sit on the ocean. In the resort’s words, it “begins atop a massive sand dune, then quickly opens into a sprawling meadow,” then “works higher into the coastal forest” before coming back down to finish in the dunes.

The climbing is in the hole notes. The 1st goes “slightly uphill through a saddle of sand dunes.” The 7th is a long uphill par 4 to an elevated green. The 16th is an uphill par 5 into the prevailing wind that “will play longer than the yardage indicates.” The resort put water refill stations after the 3rd, 6th and 15th for a reason.

It is 6,788 yards from the tips, par 71, and it is the quietest round at the resort. Out in the forest you can go several holes without seeing the ocean.

Cabot’s rule is short: “We do not offer golf carts.” Everyone walks, over ground that climbs from the dunes up onto sea cliffs on Cape Breton’s west coast. The design team’s own hole guide admits “the conundrum during the design phase of Cabot Cliffs was whether we could make it work given the elevations.”

They made it work. The 9th is a short hole shaped by the crosswind, with the green right against the cliffs. The 16th, the one you’ve seen in photos, plays to a green the guide says “looks like it is hanging out over the ocean.” The 18th crosses a ravine to a narrow, serpentine green. The resort describes spring and fall as “misty rain and wind off the ocean.”

It’s the only course on this list that needs a passport, and getting there is part of the effort: a two-hour drive from Sydney or three and a half from Halifax.

The Ocean Course is flat, and the resort itself calls it its easiest walk. It is on this list for the wind. Ten holes run along the Atlantic and the other eight parallel it, and the resort says a player “can experience up to an 8-club difference on holes” depending on how hard and which way it blows.

Alice Dye suggested raising the course up out from behind the dunes, which left it exposed to the wind. Because Kiawah has no prevailing wind, Pete Dye designed “two courses in one,” one for an easterly and one for a westerly. On the 194-yard 14th, the most exposed green on the course, Dye expected players to need “between a 2- and 4-iron.”

It is a physical test of a different kind: four-plus hours of leaning into it, on foot, with the sea in your ear the whole way.

We-Ko-Pa is owned by the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, and the club puts its appeal plainly: “with no homes, roads, businesses or development of any kind, at We-Ko-Pa, it’s just you, your ball and the sights and sounds of nature.” Around Scottsdale, that is rare.

Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw walked the land for two months before they settled on a routing, and the club says “hardly any dirt was moved.” Tees and greens sit close together, and the club calls it one of just a few courses in Scottsdale built for walking. You play among hundreds of saguaros, which grow to 40 or 50 feet and live 150 to 175 years, with views of four mountain ranges: the Superstitions, the McDowells, the Mazatzals and Four Peaks.

Crenshaw’s line about the site: “This ol’ boney ground has some sting to it.” Roadrunners cross the fairways, hawks circle overhead and, in the club’s words, the occasional coyote shows up in the distance.

This is the most remote place on the list and the quietest. Silvies is a working cattle and goat ranch of more than 150,000 acres in eastern Oregon, at about 5,000 feet, which makes it what the ranch calls the highest course in Oregon. There is no cell service. The ranch’s own advice to golfers: “it is a long way to the hospital – please don’t overdo it.”

Dan Hixson built two reversible 18s, Craddock and Hankins, which play the same ground in opposite directions. Then there is McVeigh’s Gauntlet, seven holes on a ridge where the caddies are goats carrying your bag. The owners describe a long-running habitat restoration for wildlife and fish, and elk graze the valley.

FORE Magazine put it best: “But if you want to be alone and unbothered, Silvies Valley Ranch is pure gold.”

Golf Digest’s description of Black Mesa is hard to beat: “there is no development on or near the vast, high-desert property.” The course runs through buttes, sagebrush ridges and dry arroyos. It is owned by Santa Clara Pueblo, 25 miles north of Santa Fe, with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in view.

Arroyos come into play on ten of the eighteen holes. The 4th has one fourteen feet deep; on the 18th, one runs the whole length of the hole. Architect Baxter Spann called it “the most interesting and spectacular site I have ever had the opportunity to work with.” His note on the 1st hole gave this story its opening line.

It is also the cheapest course in our Spirit section, at about $91 on a weekday with a cart.

Northwood is nine holes of Alister MacKenzie routing in a grove of redwoods on the Russian River. Jack Neville, a Bohemian Club member, came up with the idea of a course on 70 wooded acres across the river from the Bohemian Grove, and he brought in MacKenzie and Robert Hunter, who designed it in 1928.

It is not remote, and it is not grand. It sits on a highway in a small river town, there are homes around it, and GOLF.com’s Noel Freeman wrote that it “could use some restorative touches.” He also called it “a period piece and a wonderful walk amid arboreal splendor,” which is why it’s here. Redwood trunks line the holes, and in the morning the light comes through them in shafts.

Treat it as a day, not a week: walk 18 by going around twice, then spend the rest of the trip on the Sonoma coast.

Sand Valley sits in an ancient glacial lakebed in central Wisconsin, on ground that had been planted over as a red pine plantation. The resort’s owners pulled the pines and started bringing the sand barrens back: a Field Museum guide counts 250 acres of sand barrens and prairie being restored, plus 200 acres of oak savanna and jack pine managed with fire, as habitat for creatures like the Karner blue butterfly.

The original Coore & Crenshaw course came out of that ground in 2017, and the resort sells it as “The original course that’s like golfing in a national park.” Blowout bunkers, scrub and big open sky, on 12,000 acres in all. The Field Museum guide opens with Aldo Leopold, whose A Sand County Almanac was written about Wisconsin’s sand country.

It’s a big resort now, with more courses and real estate for sale, so it isn’t empty. But play the original late in the day and it gets very quiet. That’s our hero photo up top.