Black Butte Ranch - Big Meadow Course

The Big Meadow Course at Black Butte Ranch was designed by Robert Muir Graves and opened in 1971 as one of the first championship-caliber layouts in Central Oregon. Set beneath the towering silhouette of Black Butte and the Three Sisters peaks, the par-72 course winds through Ponderosa pine forest with open meadow holes that frame the Cascade Mountain scenery.

Big Meadow is an 18-hole course at Black Butte Ranch in Sisters, Oregon, designed by Robert Muir Graves and opened in 1972 as the founding golf facility of a four-season resort community nestled within a ponderosa pine forest eight miles northwest of Sisters at the eastern base of the Cascades. Graves, a California-based architect who designed numerous courses across the Pacific Coast and mountain West, built the Big Meadow layout to work with the ranch's open terrain — routing holes through the meadow clearings and ponderosa pine corridors in a design that emphasized playability and accessibility for the resort community's diverse membership. Golfweek Magazine honored Big Meadow as one of the "Best Courses You Can Play" in Oregon in 2013, a recognition that confirmed the enduring quality of the 1972 design more than four decades after its opening. Black Butte Ranch was developed in the mid-1960s on land that former San Franciscan Stewart S. Lowery had purchased in the 1930s. The development transformed the working ranch into a planned resort community of private residences, resort lodging, and recreational amenities, with the golf courses as the centerpiece of a year-round outdoor lifestyle offering skiing at nearby Mt. Bachelor in winter and golf, hiking, and cycling in summer. The ponderosa pine forest that covers much of the Black Butte Ranch property provides the visual setting for both Big Meadow and the companion Glaze Meadow course, giving the resort an enclosed, nature-surrounded character that contrasts with the more open Central Oregon courses in the drier desert terrain east of the Cascades.

The Big Meadow course remains faithful to Graves's original routing, a design philosophy that has served the course well: maintaining the 1972 layout while updating surfaces and infrastructure has preserved the character of a course that the surrounding forest and meadow environment makes irreplaceable. The course plays through open meadow areas separated by tall ponderosa corridors, with the mountain backdrop of the Three Sisters visible from elevated vantage points across the round. The combination of the forest setting, the meadow openings, and the Cascade views creates an aesthetic that is recognizably Central Oregon while retaining the specific character of Black Butte Ranch. The companion Glaze Meadow course was added in 1982 and comprehensively redesigned by John Fought in 2012, bringing the ranch to its current 36-hole configuration.

Together, Big Meadow and Glaze Meadow provide the resort community with two meaningfully different playing experiences — Graves's natural, meadow-and-pine routing from 1972 alongside Fought's more contemporary mountain design aesthetic. The combination makes Black Butte Ranch one of the more historically complete resort golf destinations in the Pacific Northwest, with courses representing two generations of design thinking applied to the same ponderosa pine landscape.