Most people who move to the country give up their game. The course becomes an hour each way, so nine holes eats a day and you stop going.
Count what is actually around Clagstone and the arithmetic goes the other direction. There are ten courses within thirty road miles of the plat, measured on the road network rather than as the crow flies. Twin Lakes Village is the near one at fifteen and a half miles, through Spirit Lake on Highway 54. StoneRidgeStoneRidge Golf ClubBlanchard, Idaho. Mountain course north of the plat.stoneridgeidaho.com at Blanchard is eighteen. AvondaleAvondale Golf ClubHayden Lake. Long-standing member and public play.avondalegolfcourse.com and Hayden Lake Country Club are both about twenty. Then Coeur d’Alene Golf Club, The Links, Highlands, Ponderosa Springs, and Prairie Falls fill in between twenty-four and twenty-eight.
Twenty-seven miles gets you to the one everybody has heard of. The Coeur d’Alene Resort courseThe Coeur d'Alene Resort Golf CourseThe floating green, moved by cable to a different yardage each day.cdaresort.com and its movable island green sit on the lake, and it is the course your friends will ask to play when they visit. Push out to forty-nine miles and you reach Circling RavenCircling Raven Golf ClubWorley, Idaho. Regularly ranked among the best public courses in the United States.cdacasino.com, which turns up on national best-public lists most years and has the room to prove it at over seven thousand yards.
The honest part, because the distances are the honest part: these are miles, not minutes. A season pass and a tee sheet do not care how fast the drive feels, and thirty road miles in the Panhandle is a genuinely different thing from thirty miles in traffic. Most of it is Highway 54 and US-95, two lanes moving well, and the drive to Hayden is the same one you already make for the hardware store.
Golf is not the only thing that gets easier when the roads are paved to your door and plowed by the highway district. But it is the one that quietly decides whether you keep playing after the move. Out here you can still make a tee time before work.
Clubs in the truck, not in the garage.
All of that sits on actual ground. See the fifty-eight on the plat →
