Buffalo Ridge Springs Golf Course

Buffalo Ridge Springs — originally known as Branson Creek Golf Club — is a Tom Fazio design opened in 1999 at the Big Cedar Lodge resort complex near Hollister, Missouri. The par-71 championship layout winds through the rugged Ozark terrain above Table Rock Lake, earning consistent recognition as one of Missouri's finest public-access courses.

Buffalo Ridge Springs Golf Course in Hollister, Missouri is an 18-hole Tom Fazio design that opened in 1999 on the dramatic limestone bluff and Ozark mountain terrain of Taney County — a 7,036-yard, par-71 layout that both Golf Magazine and Golf Digest have ranked as the best public course in Missouri, built by Fazio with the assistance of collaborators Beau Welling and Dennis Wise through a construction process that required blasting 1.6 million cubic yards of rock and hauling over 1 million cubic yards of topsoil to the site, creating a course of national caliber on terrain whose geological character defines its most memorable moments. The course was originally developed in 1999 under the name Branson Creek as part of a residential golf community development four miles south of Branson. Johnny Morris, the Bass Pro Shops founder and outdoor recreation entrepreneur, purchased the course in 2013 as part of his broader Big Cedar Lodge resort expansion that transformed the Branson-area outdoor recreation landscape into the Top of the Rock destination.

The acquisition integrated Buffalo Ridge Springs into the larger golf complex at Big Cedar Lodge, giving the Fazio design the resort infrastructure of the Top of the Rock campus — which also includes a par-3 course designed by Arnold Palmer and a Tiger Woods-designed short course — while preserving the championship identity that the original Branson Creek development established. Tom Fazio's construction approach to the Hollister site required the engineering intervention that the Ozark limestone topography demanded. The 1.6 million cubic yards of rock blasted from the site represent one of the largest construction excavations undertaken for a golf course in the Midwest, and the process of blasting through the limestone revealed a cave in the cliff behind the 17th green — a natural discovery that became one of the course's most distinctive visual features, with the limestone cave mouth visible from the 17th fairway as a geological artifact of the construction that created the hole.

The 1 million cubic yards of topsoil hauled to the site provided the growing medium that the Ozark rock required before golf turf could be established across the fairway corridors and rough areas. The Ozark mountain setting that gives Buffalo Ridge Springs its most powerful visual character — the limestone bluffs, the hardwood forest corridors, the sweeping valley views — provides a golf experience distinctly different from the flat Missouri plains that define most of the state's golf landscape. The combination of the dramatic elevation changes that the bluff terrain creates, the abundant native trees that Fazio incorporated throughout the routing, and the sparkling Ozark lakes that reflect the sky from multiple positions throughout the round gives Buffalo Ridge Springs the visual quality that has sustained its best-in-state recognition across more than two decades of Missouri public golf competition.

Hollister's position in Taney County just outside Branson — the entertainment destination on Table Rock Lake that draws millions of visitors annually — gives Buffalo Ridge Springs its market context as both a destination for traveling golfers who include the course in Branson area itineraries and a year-round resource for the Ozarks golf community whose access to Tom Fazio design quality is otherwise limited to the private clubs of Kansas City and St. Louis.