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More from Michigan: The Upper Peninsula

By Craig Brass | Photo: Sweetgrass Golf Club at Island Resort & Casino


Michigan’s Upper Peninsula – The U.P. – is vast area of natural beauty and resources. At 16,377 square miles, the land mass is just less than New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Long Island combined, but with only 1.5% of the population.

The persona of the Upper Peninsula is that of rugged forests, rough terrain, clear lakes, rivers and streams, and abundant wildlife. When mentioned to the uninitiated, thoughts go to remote hunting lodges, hard to find trout streams, harder drinking dive bars, and meat pasties—a pastry wrapped around meat, rutabagas, onions, and potatoes—that every self-respecting Yooper, the nickname of those from the U.P., has a home recipe for that’s been handed down for generations.

However, the U.P. is substantially more than the hardscrabble image. Home to a variety of natural wonders, such as 300-plus waterfalls, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, Porcupine Mountains, 4,000 inland lakes, 1,700 miles of Great Lakes shoreline, and touristy Mackinac Island. In fact, in 2016 Lonely Planet named the Upper Peninsula as the only United States destination on their world’s best value list.

There are also wonders of the man-made variety, starting with the Mackinac Bridge. Serving as the primary gateway to the U.P., Mighty Mac stretches above the Straits of Mackinac from Mackinaw City in the Lower Peninsula to St. Ignace in the Upper Peninsula. At just under five miles, it’s one of the longest suspension bridges in the world.

Forty lighthouses dot the upper Peninsula coastline formed by Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior. Many have been retired but welcome visitors, and one, Big Bay Point Lighthouse, is now a bed and breakfast with seven guest rooms, and offers a wonderful place to stay if you’re heading to Marquette.

If you like big boats, really big boats, there’s no better place to get an up-close look at freighters than the Soo Locks in Sault Ste. Marie. Originally opened in 1855, the current two parallel locks, Poe and MacArthur, date back to 1896 and 1943 respectfully. The lock system allows Great Lakes freighters, some over 1,000-feet in length, to bypass the 21-foot drop and rapids between Lake Superior and the St. Mary’s River. Roughly 10,000 passages take place each year, so you’re all but guaranteed to see a few on every visit.

The Upper Peninsula provides boundless outdoor activities and adventures, including golf. With more than 50 public golf courses to choose from, there’s a little bit for everyone. Some are of the cut-off jean and t-shirt variety, where pulling a cart with your golf bag and cooler in tow are not only permitted but encouraged. Others, such as Greywalls, Sweetgrass, and Wawashkomo, have gathered national acclaim and are definitely worth the effort it takes to get to the U.P.

Many of Michigan’s first courses were nine-hole layouts constructed in the late 1890’s. One of the first was Wawashkomo Golf Club on Mackinac Island. Built by Chicagoans who had begun to develop cottages on the island, the course is on the site of a late-stage battle of the War of 1812 between British and American troops, a day that went the way of the Brits.

To design the course they recruited Alex Smith, a club pro originally from Carnoustie, Scotland, who would go on to win a pair of U.S. Open Championships, and four of the first eight Met Opens—three of which he won while serving as head professional at Wykagyl Country Club. Wawashkomo opened for play in 1898 and is the only nine-hole course deemed an American Historic Landmark of Golf by Golf Digest.

As with much of Mackinac Island, Wawashkomo retains its identity from a previous age. Narrow fairways, small greens, and minuscule tee boxes (all easier to maintain with a push mower) reflect the 19th century simplicity of its Scottish heritage. There are a few oddities at Wawashkomo as well: Chocolate drops dot a couple of fairways, and a circus ring—a hedge of sorts and the strangest obstacle you’ll ever see on a course—surrounds the third green. Also, to get there one needs to hire a horse drawn taxi, it’s a mile and a half from the ferry docks and there are no cars on Mackinac Island. If you’re so inclined, you can still rent a set of hickories and have a go at it old school. At 2,999 yards, this nine-hole course with two sets of tees still plays with a wee bit of Scottish feel as it has for more than 120 years.

Two and a half hours west of the Mackinac Bridge is the port city of Escanaba, on the northern shore of Lake Michigan. The area has a number of courses, including two at Island Resort and Casino: Sage Run and Sweetgrass, the later recently named the 2022 Golf Course of the Year by the National Golf Course Owners Association (NGCOA), and home to the Epson Tour’s (formerly Symetra) Island Resort Championship.

Both Sage Run and Sweetgrass were designed by Paul Albanese. “Sage Run is more of a rough and rugged course that plays up, down, over and across a geologic landform called a drumlin,” Paul told me after landing from a working trip to Vietnam. “Sweetgrass is more of a smooth and gentle prairie style course that has a great rhythm and flow.

“Because Sweetgrass did not have a lot of natural features from which to respond to, we utilized the native heritage, culture, and history as inspiration to the forms we created. We took stories from the Potawatomi, and we used them as our muses for the golf holes. Much like an abstract painting or how Native Americans would look at landforms and make stories about them, we took the stories and made the landforms, in an abstract subtle land-respectful manner.”

Island Resort and Casino is owned and operated by the Hannahville Indian Community, a federally recognized Potawatomi Indian Tribe, and is located just west of Escanaba in Harris, Mich. The resort has 400-plus guest rooms and a new hotel tower, with the Horizons Steakhouse on the top floor.

Further west, in the city of Iron Mountain—a knock-down wedge from the Wisconsin border on the far western side of the U.P.—is home to Pine Mountain Resort’s Timberstone golf course. Routed through a forest of towering pine and sparkling lakes, the course’s stone-lined creeks and severe elevation changes compliment the artistic bunkering and green complexes designed by Paul Albanese when he worked for long-time Michigan golf course architect Jerry Mathews.

Like many of the ski resort-based courses of the lower peninsula, the architects took advantage of all 240 acres provided to them to find wonderful holes that incorporate and magnify the natural surroundings. The hallmark is the par three 17th, with a 110-foot vertical drop from the back tee to the hourglass shaped green, pinched in the middle by opposing bunkers (pictured). Like many of the holes at Timberstone, there are wonderful mountainside vistas.

An hour and fifteen minutes north of Escanaba on the shore of Lake Superior is Marquette. A bustling port city in the mid-1800s at the height of that century’s iron ore mining boom, it’s now home to Northern Michigan University, the Superior Dome (the largest wooden dome in the world, also known as the Yooper Dome), and Presque Isle Park, 323 acres of forested land designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.

Within the city is Marquette Golf Club, semi-private club that opened in 1926 with a nine-hole Langford and Moreau layout. An additional nine was added in the 1960’s to create the Heritage course, but the club languished in moderate obscurity for nearly 80 years, until Greywalls.

“The land, the course, it was all unlike anything else I’ve ever been involved with,” said Mike DeVries, who designed the internationally acclaimed Greywalls course. “They have 60-foot granite cliff faces mixed with deep sand pockets. Difficult to work around, but it gave me great opportunities to do things I’ve never done before. Such as a granite wall 10-feet from the fifth green (pictured). You can’t create stuff like this.”

The par four 7th hole has a ridgeline of rocks jutting through the turf in the center of the fairway. Numerous green complexes are framed with exposed granite outcroppings. The elevation changes more often than the Upper Peninsula weather as the course winds its way through dense hardwoods, and there isn’t a flat lie on the property to be found, save the tee boxes.

The accolades for Greywalls began to pour in immediately after it opened, receiving prominent mention in virtually every best new course list. And while it holds a high rank amongst a strong field of other Michigan courses, one would think it would bump up against the top if it were slightly more accessible.

A trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula solely to play golf is a worthy endeavor, but not without logistical challenges. Unlike the northern Lower Peninsula, where resorts such as Boyne and Treetops have multiple exemplary courses at one location, there are some miles to be logged between venues.

Delta has flights from LaGuardia into Marquette, with a layover in Detroit’s Metropolitan airport. This is perhaps the most efficient way to approach the journey, as it would provide a start to the “triangle” of the three premier golf establishments in the U.P.: Greywalls, Timberstone, and Island Resort and Casino’s Sage Run and Sweetgrass.

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