Renowned Minnesota vacation spot offers highly-rated golf and loads of family activities
Photographs by Peter Wong Photography
This article appeared in the April 2024 edition of Chicago District Golfer.
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Deacon's Lodge Golf Course, ranked among Minnesota's best, plays along the northern shore of Pelican Lake less than 30 minutes north of Brainerd.
They were pulling record walleye out of the lakes around Brainerd, Minnesota long before Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1908. So, it should come as no surprise the area blossomed into a vacation destination once families started hitting the road in Ford’s “tin lizzies.”
By the late 1920s, Brainerd’s thriving lake resorts – already offering fishing, boating, swimming and horseback riding – began building golf courses. Now, the four largest resorts operate 10 courses among them. All are tightly clustered around Brainerd’s lakes. All are within 30 minutes of one another, and all offer exceptional value.
Three Brainerd resort courses are ranked among Minnesota’s best public-access courses, and one resort’s recently-renovated course will likely be ranked in the next update.
One could argue the Brainerd Lakes region, two hours northwest of Minneapolis, is among the most golf-rich vacation destinations in the U.S. outside of Arizona, Palm Springs and Myrtle Beach.
The resorts – all family-owned and family-oriented – offer a dizzying array of non-golf activities. A by-no-means-complete list includes: swimming, boating, water skiing, fishing, paddleboarding, kayaking, tennis, pickleball, ziplining, mountain biking, trapshooting and axe throwing. There are tie-dye t-shirt-making classes for kids, and yoga, afternoon brewpub art classes and lake cocktail and dinner cruises for adults.
“With all the lakes in the area – there's just a ton of lakes – it's always been a fishing and water-skiing and swimming summertime destination,” said Greg Wires, publisher of Golf Minnesota, a statewide golf guide.
The Brainerd area is pocked by more than 450 lakes, most leftovers from the Superior Lobe of the Labrador Ice sheet of the last Ice Age. Similar to the kettle moraines of the Wisconsin Dells, Brainerd’s lakes were gouged by glaciers that left behind a wrinkled landscape of hardwood forests and a sandy soil that golf course architects absolutely love.
A survey of golf rates at the top four Brainerd resorts shows rounds in mid-May ranging between $120 to $160, but stay-and-play packages can knock quite a bit off those numbers. Best of all, while the four leading resorts are competitors, they happily offer sizeable golf discounts to their rivals’ guests.
The golf is tree-lined and hilly but not overly so. The upshot is that in return for an eight-and-a-half-hour drive into the North Woods, Chicagoland golfers can get a heckuva deal for a week of golf or longer.
The Pioneer
The Grand View Lodge in Nisswa on the north end of Gull Lake started as a lodge for prospective buyers of lakefront home lots in 1919. The lodge later served as a hotel for parents of kids attending nearby summer camps. Now, its historically significant main lodge is the centerpiece of an assortment of lodging options that include cabins, cottages and homes – some with as many as nine bedrooms to accommodate large families.
Grand View operates two 18-hole courses, the Pines and the Preserve, with the better being The Pines, ranked No. 3 on Golfweek’s best-of-Minnesota list. The Pines, opened in 1990, is a 27-hole rotation that plays just under 6,900 yards from the tips across and through marshes, lakes and woods.
Aside from raves about its layout, The Pines wins high marks from players for its vibe. They’re friendly people who seem genuinely glad to see you.
One Lake Over
The Breezy Point Resort on the western shore of Pelican Lake was opened in 1921 by “Capt. Billy” Fawcett, a magazine publisher who knew the value of publicity. It soon welcomed celebrity guests that included Clark Gable, Carol Lombard, Jack Dempsey and Tom Mix. Its lodge, which could house as many as 700 people, was the largest of its kind at the time.
Breezy Point operates three golf courses – the tight 5,292-yard par-72 Traditional Course, the 6,680-yard White Birch Course, and its most acclaimed offering – the Deacon’s Lodge Course, its Arnold Palmer signature design, which plays 6,913 yards.
Ranked No. 3 among Minnesota’s best public courses by Joe Passov of Links magazine, Deacon’s Lodge was built in 1999 on 499 acres of hardwood forest. Some consider its 433-yard fifth hole, a gradual right dogleg around a lake, to be the best par 4 in Minnesota.
Mark Neva, director of golf at Deacon’s Lodge, recalled the owners’ instructions to Palmer Design: “We want 18 holes. Here’s your 500-acre blank canvas. We don’t want 27 holes. We don’t want 36 holes. There’s not a planned-unit development that will handicap or compromise the design. Just give us your best 18-hole layout.”
The result is a course that winds through rising and falling woodlands with a naturalistic Pine Valley-esque feel. Repeat visitors note the course’s pristine conditioning and sweeping views devoid of encroaching homes.
The Newcomer
Cragun’s Resort opened in 1940 as a collection of rustic cabins on Gull Lake’s south shore, which is graced with a mile-long sand beach. The resort has maintained a few of the original lakeside cabins in their original 1940s condition for nostalgic repeat guests, although most cabins have been updated. There is an updated central lodge and course-side rental homes.
Cragun’s was a latecomer to golf. In 1998, it opened 36 holes designed by Robert Trent Jones, Jr. plus an RTJ Jr.-designed par-3 course. Wires called Cragun’s courses among the area’s most scenic when they were built, but their 1990s-era target-golf design made them too difficult for mid- and high-handicapper guests.
Enter Minnesota native and 1996 British Open winner Tom Lehman, who last July completely redid the Jones courses, widening fairways, removing trees, opening up shot and sight lines, and reducing most forced carries. The result is two eminently playable courses – the 7,070-yard par-72 Lehman 18 and the 7,001-yard par-70 Dutch Course, named after the resort’s 91-year-old owner, Merrill “Dutch” Cragun, Jr., which will play as a 27-hole rotation when a final nine opens in 2025.
The 18 holes now in play as the Dutch Course feature six par 3s, eight par 4s and four par 5s. That course was the site of a 2023 PGA Tour Canada event and it will retain its Labor Day weekend spot in the 2024 schedule as a stop on the newly-reorganized PGA Tour Americas.
The consensus among golf writers who attended the grand opening last July is that, thanks to Lehman’s handiwork, Cragun’s likely will crack Minnesota’s best-public-courses list within the next two years.
Old School
Madden’s on Gull Lake is a 1,000-acre property that has acquired other resorts since its opening in the late 1920s. It straddles a long narrow peninsula that extends into Gull Lake, giving it plenty of lake frontage for lodging and water activities.
Madden’s first course, Pine Beach East, opened in 1927. The resort now operates three 18-hole courses and a nine-hole course. Its marquee eight-hole course is “The Classic,” designed in 1997 by Scott Hoffman (Madden’s then-golf course superintendent).
With its tight fairways winding through a seriously hilly oak forest, The Classic remains highly ranked both in Minnesota and nationally: No. 3 on Links magazine’s Minnesota list; No. 8 on Golfweek’s Minnesota list; and No. 81 on Golf Digest’s “America’s Greatest 100 Public Courses” list.
“It's beautiful but not for the faint of heart, a hilly course with some narrow, pine-lined fairways and occasional challenging shots over water from sidehill or downhill lies,” Golf Digest reported. “But, like other multiple-course operations such as Bethpage and Cog Hill, Madden's has easier alternate layouts for high-handicappers.”
Dan Vukelich, a former Chicagoan, is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times. He lives in Albuquerque and works remotely as the online editor of Alabama Golf News.