Arcadia Bluffs Golf Club: South Course

Arcadia Bluffs features two distinct 18-hole courses on the Michigan coast. The Bluffs Course by Warren Henderson and Rick Smith is perched 200 feet above Lake Michigan with fifty revetted bunkers and rolling fescue-covered terrain that captures the spirit of a seaside Irish links. The South Course by Dana Fry and Jason Straka channels Golden Age strategic architecture with massive fairways, geometric plateau greens, and a jigsaw puzzle of intersecting bunkers.

Arcadia Bluffs Golf Club occupies 245 acres of bluff-top terrain above the eastern shore of Lake Michigan near the village of Arcadia in Manistee County, Michigan. The site was assembled in the mid-1990s from what had been a combination of apple and cherry orchards and densely wooded land, at elevations as much as one hundred feet above the lake's surface. Construction began in 1997, the clubhouse opened on July 4, 1999, and the golf course opened to limited play on Labor Day of the same year. The club was designed by Warren Henderson, a Michigan-based architect, in collaboration with Rick Smith, a PGA Tour instructor and course designer whose teaching base at Treetops Resort gave him deep familiarity with northern Michigan's terrain and growing conditions. Henderson and Smith designed the Bluffs Course to maximize the property's most extraordinary asset: uninterrupted views of Lake Michigan from nearly every hole. They positioned the routing along the bluff edge on several holes, creating visual drama comparable to the great clifftop links of Ireland while working within terrain that is parkland in character rather than true linksland. The turf is windswept native fescue on the exposed bluff-side holes, transitioning to bluegrass and bentgrass in the more sheltered interior sections of the property. The design is restrained in its use of artificial features: there are relatively few trees in play, and the course relies on natural landforms, wind exposure, and the bluff edge itself to define the strategic challenge rather than on earthworks or constructed hazards.

The most celebrated hole is the par-3 twelfth, which plays across a natural ravine to a green set at the bluff edge with Lake Michigan directly beyond — a hole that has appeared on numerous national lists of great par-3 holes in American golf. The par-4 eighteenth finishes with a view of the lake that is among the most dramatic closing-hole settings in the Midwest. Wind is a constant strategic variable: the prevailing westerlies off Lake Michigan can add or subtract multiple club lengths on the exposed holes, and scoring depends heavily on reading the wind's direction and strength across the full eighteen holes rather than applying a fixed distance plan at any given hole.

Arcadia Bluffs was immediately recognized after its 1999 opening as a standout public-access course in the Midwest. It has appeared in Golf Digest's America's 100 Greatest Public Courses since its first inclusion, a sustained ranking maintained for more than twenty years. The resort model has attracted golfers from across the Great Lakes region and from farther afield, with the combination of the lakeside setting, the course quality, and the broader northern Michigan amenities — proximity to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the Traverse City wine region, and the small-town character of the Manistee Coast — producing a multi-day destination experience that is difficult to replicate elsewhere in the Midwest.

In 2018 the club opened the South Course, designed by Dana Fry and Jason Straka. Fry and Straka modeled the South Course on the template-hole tradition of Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor, incorporating interpretations of classic design templates — Redan, Alps, Biarritz, Eden, Short — on the inland sections of the property away from the bluff edge. The South Course was recognized as one of the best new courses in America upon opening, with its architectural relationship to the Bluffs Course — Macdonald-Raynor templates in dialogue with Henderson and Smith's naturalistic blufftop approach — giving Arcadia Bluffs a dual personality that distinguishes it from single-course resort destinations. Arcadia Bluffs remains the best-known golf destination in northern Michigan and one of the premier public golf experiences in the American upper Midwest. The Bluffs Course's lakeside drama and the South Course's architectural interest together make the club a natural two-day minimum commitment for serious golfers, and the combination of the two distinct design approaches rewards multiple visits. The club's consistent national rankings across more than two decades confirm Henderson and Smith's original design as a lasting contribution to American public golf, built on a standout natural sites on the Great Lakes shoreline.

The club operates as a semi-private resort facility, open to the public for daily fee play while maintaining a membership program for local and regional golfers who visit frequently. This hybrid model has allowed Arcadia Bluffs to invest in course quality at a level that a purely daily-fee operation might not sustain, while maintaining the public accessibility that gives it its regional and national reputation. The northern Michigan golf season runs from approximately May through October, compressed by the lake-effect climate, which means the course receives its entire annual play volume in a six-month window — a scheduling and maintenance challenge that the club has managed consistently well over its more than twenty-five years of operation.