Arcadia Bluffs Golf Club: Bluffs Course

The Bluffs is the original 18 at Arcadia Bluffs, built 225 feet above the shore of Lake Michigan on roughly 245 acres of former orchard and woodland. Warren Henderson and Rick Smith designed the course to read as an open, windswept links, with natural fescue roughs, firm native turf, and long-range views across nearly 3,100 feet of Lake Michigan shoreline.

The Bluffs Course at Arcadia Bluffs Golf Club opened for play in 1999 on a roughly 245-acre parcel above Lake Michigan, in the village of Arcadia in northwest Michigan. The course was designed by Warren Henderson and Rick Smith and was conceived from the outset as a links-style layout intended to evoke the seaside courses of the British Isles rather than the parkland and resort golf more commonly associated with northern Michigan. Construction began in 1997, following the clearing of approximately 80 acres of heavily wooded ground to open up expansive long-range views of Lake Michigan from the bluff line.

The property drops roughly 225 feet from its highest elevation down to the top of the bluff, which itself sits about 180 feet above lake level, and the course includes approximately 3,100 feet of direct Lake Michigan frontage along its western boundary. The site had previously been a mix of apple and cherry orchards and dense woods, and the removal of the tree canopy during construction created significant early environmental problems. Heavy rains washed across the newly cleared bluff and opened a substantial ravine that drained sediment into Lake Michigan, triggering a lawsuit from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and a remediation project that exceeded one million dollars in costs, all completed by the developer before the course opened.

The Bluffs plays to a par of 72 and stretches to approximately 7,300 yards from the championship tees, and Henderson and Smith shaped the landforms to produce the rolling, windswept character their links template required, with native fescue roughs and closely mown approaches rather than manicured target-golf framing. Because the course sits on open ground directly above the lake, wind plays a central role in day-to-day strategy, and the routing uses the cliff edge prominently at several holes along the back nine. Arcadia Bluffs was built as a daily-fee destination rather than a private club, and in the years after opening it became one of Michigan's most widely recognized public courses.

In 2018, the property added a second 18, the South Course, designed by Dana Fry and Jason Straka and inspired by the geometric template-hole tradition of Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor, providing a deliberate stylistic contrast to the links-oriented Bluffs. The Bluffs itself has not been subject to a publicly announced wholesale redesign and remains the original Henderson-Smith layout, anchoring the 36-hole experience at the property.