Featured Golf Trip: Forest Dunes

Michigan golf, man.

Just a ton of options in that state, and none of them come with quite the extreme price tag of a few destination golf peers in neighboring Wisconsin (looking at you, Whistling).

Let’s dig into one of the best: Forest Dunes. Set in the woods of northern Michigan, the resort manages to pack a ton of golfing diversity into two terrific 18-hole layouts.

First, there’s Tom Weiskopf’s namesake course, which takes its name from a sort of duality you’ll experience within a single round. The front 9 is cut out of thick woods, giving each hole its own turn at the mic, calling to mind “the experience of Bandon Trails—each hole its own adventure, many of them secluded by the massive pines, an ode to nature as much as to golf,” as we wrote of a previous, rain-soaked trip to Roscommon. And then you make the turn, and the dunes emerge, and the layout opens up, and now you’re dealing with massive bunkers and overgrown fescue.

So you fit those two experiences into a single round, and then you head across the parking lot to The Loop, Tom Doak’s reversible routing, and it feels like you’ve stumbled onto an entirely new property. You’re playing links golf now, navigating the slopes and choosing between putter, wedge, or wood from around the greens. Just an incredibly fun challenge, and when you return the next day to play The Loop the other way around, it’ll feel like a new golf course, and you’ll be scratching your head trying to remember from where you’d played yesterday’s shot into various greens.

Add in the Bootlegger short course—if you’re lucky, they’ll let you keep looping it until the sun goes down for a single greens fee, as they allowed us—and you’ve found yourself a golf trip that punches well above its weight. Especially when it comes to value. Forest Dunes ranks the 53rd best public golf course in America, and The Loop comes in at 40th. But they’re priced at the low end of that rankings tier, and lodging out there in the middle of nowhere is reasonable (on-site) or downright cheap (off).

Ambitious golf trips could also tack on a trip to Arcadia Bluffs, as we did. There, you’ll find another two exceptional top 100 routings in the Bluffs (32nd) and South (54th) courses, plus a 12-holer called The Dozen that opened in 2025. Pricing is quite comparable to that of Forest Dunes, maybe a touch higher.

We haven’t experienced all the courses we write about in this space first-hand. We look at our job as providing you the preliminary research to give you the vibe of the place. But this is one we can speak to directly. And here are those words: Do it.