Boyne Highlands Resort - Moor Course

The Moor Course at Boyne Highlands Resort is one of northern Michigan's oldest championship layouts, designed by William Newcomb and opened in 1963. Playing to 6,809 yards across rolling moorland terrain near Harbor Springs, the course features a slope rating of 144 and has challenged golfers for more than six decades as the foundation of the Boyne Highlands resort experience.

The Moor Course at Boyne Highlands Resort in Harbor Springs, Michigan is a Bill Newcomb design that represents the foundational golf experience at one of northern Michigan's most storied resort destinations — the course that established the Boyne Highlands property as a golf destination in Emmet County before the resort's subsequent expansion to four championship courses across multiple decades. Newcomb, the Ann Arbor-based architect whose Michigan practice produced courses that became the infrastructure of the state's resort golf industry, designed the Moor on the rolling terrain of the Emmet County highlands to play to 6,850 yards with a par of 72, creating a layout that has served as the standard-setting benchmark for the resort's golf program through more than five decades of northern Michigan play. Bill Newcomb's design philosophy, as expressed at the Moor and across his extensive Michigan portfolio, prioritized strategic challenge over aesthetic drama — courses that test the full range of a golfer's shot-making inventory, where the routing, hazard placement, and green complex design create genuine decision points rather than simple target golf.

The Moor reflects this approach in its characteristic combination of doglegs and water hazards: the front nine presents bending fairway corridors where the tee shot's direction and trajectory determine the approach angle, with holes 1, 2, 7, and 9 each featuring dogleg shapes that reward the player who commits to the corner. The back nine opens with one of the resort's most demanding par-4 holes, where three separate ponds positioned on both sides of the fairway create water hazard decisions that require precise distance and directional control, and closes with a snaking par-5 18th whose water hazard on the finishing approach keeps pressure on the scorecard through the final shot. The bentgrass greens and fairways that the Moor maintains provide the playing surface quality associated with northern Michigan's most competitive resort layouts — the cool, humid Emmet County summers that favor cool-season grasses giving the Moor the firm, consistent surfaces that resort golfers expect from a destination-grade course.

The combination of bentgrass conditioning and Newcomb's strategic design gives the Moor a playing character that rewards the shotmaker who understands how to flight the ball on northern Michigan's variable wind and manage the moisture conditions that Emmet County's lake-influenced climate creates. The broader Boyne Highlands context — which by the time of the resort's full development included the Moor, the Heather (designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr.), the Donald Ross Memorial, and the Arthur Hills Course — gives the Moor its historical significance as the course that preceded all others at this destination. When golfers who have played The General at Eagle Ridge or The Bear at Grand Traverse Resort compare northern Michigan resort courses, the Moor occupies a specific position in that conversation: the course that established what Boyne Highlands was before the later championship layouts defined what it became.

In 2022, Boyne Resorts rebranded Boyne Highlands Resort as The Highlands at Harbor Springs, giving the property a name change that reflects the broader repositioning of the resort within the Boyne portfolio. The Moor retained its name under the rebranding, continuing to serve as a central component of The Highlands' golf programming alongside the resort's other championship courses. The Moor's longevity — measured in the repeat play of several generations of northern Michigan resort golfers who return to Harbor Springs year after year — confirms the enduring appeal of Newcomb's Emmet County design and the competitive quality that the course has maintained through its decades of operation.