North by Northwest: Alaska rewards you for making the trip with golf all day and all night

It wasn’t until the third hole that I fully realized I was at a golf location unlike any other I’d been to. Until that time the extensive travel distance from Connecticut and breathtaking scenery had done much to impact my sense of location. But the realization went well up when the largest rabbit I’d ever seen went sauntering across the par-4 fairway about 50 yards in front of me. It didn’t appear to be a jackrabbit. The ears were normal in size. But it was the Wilt Chamberlain of rabbits: tall, lean, built to run a fast half-mile. At his size in an Easter box as solid chocolate he’d have lasted all year with daily nibbles. By the time my boisterous gas cart got up to it, Mr. Rabbit had loped into the brush, not to be seen again, but like moose and other natural wonders his cameo was a memorable sight.

Such was the wonderment of golf in Alaska, which I experienced during a two-week Princess land-and-sea cruise last July. I’m revisiting the journey nine months later because at a time when golfers in the contiguous United States are delighted at the arrival of spring, I assure you Alaskan players have them doubled with delirium. They’ve emerged from the darkness to realize they have six months, if they’re lucky, to get their golf in before Mother Nature shuts them down once more. That’s how it is when golfers try to play on subsoil that is frozen for much of the year.

Black Diamond’s elevated first tee shows the raw conditions that will face the player. (Photography by Cliff Schrock)

The ambiguous but widely disseminated title, “The Final Frontier,” has been given to everything from space, the oceans, the earth’s poles to a Star Trek movie, an Iron Maiden album, and, distressingly, America’s political soul. Alaska, too, goes by The Final Frontier tag and I hoped on this cruise to expand my 50-year journey in golf by playing under evening sunlight, which is entirely possible in the “Land of the Midnight Sun”—another Alaskan label—and any region near the Arctic Circle.

Surely the meaning of The Final Frontier is apropos to Alaska in the golf sense. Alaska State Golf Association Executive Director Terry Thornhill told me there are just 1,700 members of the ASGA and he guesses three times that many golfers in the state, which has such harsh growing conditions that “golf course construction” is a term used loosely in most of the 49th state. It’s the 50th state when it comes to a ranking of the number of golf courses: just 20 to 25 depending on the source, all of them open to the public, the only U.S. state with such a distinction. Only a quarter of the courses have a traditional routing of 18 holes. With a population around 736,000 people, Alaska, if we use the 25 figure, has one course for every 29,440 Alaskans, which is not good for tee-time availability but the state’s first tees aren’t being crashed.

Fletch plays away on the fourth, with the green in front of the lone evergreen.

Alaska clearly attracts people because of the remote outdoors and scenery and mainly the mountains. But as Thornhill told sports writer David Droschak, “Golf in Alaska is not like golf anywhere else. We play the same game, we have the same rules, but we don’t have the same golfing environment. Most of it is prettier than you can imagine.”

Alaska has likely taken more derision than praise as a golf location. Eighteen years ago, when I compiled a list of the “Best in State” all-time from each state for Golf Digest, I had Derek Fyten, Jeff Nerland, and Danielle Gransbury repping Alaska, not quite a “who’s who” but a who’s they group. More recently, Greg Sanders would make the list, having won 10 Alaska state amateurs. Ketchikan’s Danny Edwards, who won five times on the PGA Tour and attended Oklahoma State, has more cache on the list as No. 1. And as of last August, the state itself can now feel it’s been fully accepted. For 10 years it had been waiting to get rid of the title “last state to never hold a U.S. Golf Association championship” and that was taken care of when Shelly Stouffer won the 60th U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur at Anchorage Golf Course in a 4-and-3 victory over Sue Wooster. As a Canadian, Stouffer was well trained to prevail in Alaska. As for the USGA brass, they were happy they finally made good on having the “United States” in their title for inclusion.

The par-3 6th, looking back toward the tee, which is hidden on the other side of the set of four trees.

In that sense, Alaska is indeed a final frontier as a region last to be explored or developed. The state’s meager course and golfer numbers don’t speak well of how avid golf is in Alaska on the surface. To the contrary, with such a short golf season to contend with, there is a core loyalty and enthusiasm for the sport. I can attest to how that carries over to tourists to the state as well. Every visiting golfer I encountered was ecstatic to experience the conditions and environment, particularly for nighttime golf, so that “golfed in Alaska” could be included in their golf obituary. Let’s be clear, I will be describing a course that was shaggy in comparison to the average Lower 48 layout, but it was fun! And the course conditions in Alaska, by and large, are good and getting better.

Unless you cross an ocean for your golf, playing in Alaska will be the most remote location you’ll play, although I can vouch for golf on Nova Scotia’s Cabot Trail being perhaps a notch higher because of better course conditions. Thornhill believes the Alaskan tourist trade still has great potential since those people on group tours often connect with nongolf excursions and bypass golf. If that switched around, golf rounds would pick up.

Mary tees off on the home-hole ninth, in the glow of the nearly midnight sun at 10:30.

Alaska’s short golf season of April/May to September coincides with the benefit of the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. The Lower 48 enjoy longer days but in interior Alaska the days are eerily endless. In Fairbanks, there is just under 22 hours of sunlight around the longest day June 21, with sunset at 12:47 in the morning; the sun “comes up” at 2:57.

In my golf life I’d played mountain golf, desert golf, prairie golf, seaside golf, sandy golf, forest golf, and hit floater golf balls into a driving range lake. The coldest conditions I’d ever played were in the Frozen Open in January in Illinois 30-plus years ago on the Illinois State University (now Weibring Golf Club) Golf Course. On the par-4 ninth I holed out a 6-iron for a deuce; I could hear the ball thwack on the frozen green, take two big bounces and disappear in the hole. But I’d never played tundra golf, in Alaska, at 10:30 in the evening under the sun. Alaskan courses take advantage of the midnight sun and offer tee times well into the evening and also in the wee hours of the morning. Glow-in-the-dark balls? Not in fashion here.

The No. 9 green is exhibit A showing the effect permafrost has on growing turf.

My trek to Alaska was delayed two years due to the Covid pandemic. The trip, with my wife, Mary, finally took place last year, with one of the excursions offered a nine-hole round just east of Denali National Park in Healy at nine-hole Black Diamond Resort, which not too long ago was just a six-hole layout, a hole count many promote nowadays as ideal.

Like any golf played in conditions out of the temperate regions, you have to throw out all preconceived notions you have about course upkeep. Just let it go and just golf. Alaskan golf is a little rough around the edges, although courses in southern Alaska fare better. Fairbanks in south-central Alaska is the dividing line and northern boundary for legitimate golf conditions. Midnight Sun Golf Course is northeast of Fairbanks. Course turf doesn’t do well because permafrost prevents roots from growing very deep. Turf is covered with ice for months, cutting off oxygen and when the ice thaws the water turns grass into muck that is hardly receptive to new growth of real quality. The ice freeze that many courses fear in the contiguous U.S. over the winter from grass that’s ice-covered rather than snow-shrouded would be a minor inconvenience compared to what permafrost does. What does grow must be left a little shaggy but sometimes there’s not enough “healthy” growing and you’re left with bare spots. Half of the ninth green at Black Diamond was just hard-packed dirt, and on the day we played the hole was on top of a crown. If you couldn’t gauge the “punch” of your putt with the correct weight and gave it too much you went past the cup and down the other side running off the green.

You’ll have the feeling of being watched while in the Black Diamond grillroom.

That lack of growth and waffling effect wrecks the same havoc on fairway turf as it does to greens. What looks like a normal flat or gently rolling fairway from the tee is actually a pimpled surface resembling matzo crackers upon inspection.

While most golfers might consider themselves adaptable to whatever conditions they face, they might not be so agreeable over amenities. A “course” is a course, of course, but is a “resort” a resort? Well, a resort in Alaska is not the same breed as one in Florida. The amenities at an Alaskan resort are more rough hewn than the “normal” warm-weather resorts in the Lower 48. But to tweak an old saying, one man’s low-standard fare is another man’s high-brow pleasure. That’s how Black Diamond rolls. Located just outside the Denali National Park border, Black Diamond has a tie-in as one of the excursions for guests at the Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge. That includes anyone who wants to play in the evening as Mary and I did, joined by Fletcher, a travel companion of ours with his wife, Deb.

At the appointed pick-up time, the Black Diamond school bus transport picked us up at the lodge. The driver, Olivia, was a seasonal worker as most are at Alaskan tourist spots. From Arkansas, Olivia put heart into her job. During the ride to Black Diamond, she put some fear in us about potential rock slides and said if we saw a tree growing horizontally from a hillside that indicated a past rock slide. She told us the Nenana River we just drove over was 100 feet below us, was 38 degrees and fed by a glacier. Looking out for tourist photo ops, Olivia pulled over onto the shoulder so we could take pictures of a moose wading around in a pond.

When we arrived at Black Diamond, I was reminded of what the definition of a resort is, which is simply a place to go to for vacation or recreation, not necessarily a place that spent most of its budget on landscaping. We knew that Black Diamond was not only for golfers but for covered wagon rides, ATV use, and backcountry riding. Everything about it speaks to being outdoors. Since most writers use the word rustic to describe something less than pristine or impeccable and instead something plain and simple, let’s call black Diamond rustic. That would describe the dirt-road entrance, brown wood-framed clubhouse most of us would call a lake rec house, and the metal maintenance sheds and cart barns that are positioned with the same visual prominence upon arriving as the clubhouse.

If the modest arrival hadn’t done enough to prepare us for what it meant to play tundra golf, getting out to the first tee certainly did. The teeing ground was a mix of dirt and clumpy grass that had a tilt to the right. No need to look for your name on a tee sheet, it was drive up when ready and see if the tee was open. Directional aids to plot yourself through the nine holes were minimum but not needed. The routing was basically up and down with little hole curvature, unlike the part of the globe we were on. And whatever ruts and ground imperfections there were that sent the ball this way and that were all part of the challenge – and fun. Remember: playing golf at a new place means accepting everything about it and breaking out of your home-course routine.

I had not played since fall of 2021, so my first two tee shots were snipey hooks on the par 4s. But with the holes playing just around 360, I still had short irons in. On the rabbit hole, the par-4 third, 378 yards, I put a 5-iron down the left side, which was more than sufficient to leave an 8-iron in. But without yardage markers and trying to gauge my distance, the ball airmailed the green, one-hopped off a maintenance building and ricocheted onto the green. But then I three-putted. I was adding my own element of theater to the experience. (Mary and Fletch each had par!)

Mary and I, still in daylight at 10:30, with the Denali Park mountain range in background.

We had begun around 8 p.m. in light that looked like it was 7 in my native Illinois. As we went along and I looked at the time to see it slowly approach 8:30, 9, 9:30, I was delirious with the experience of seeing the sun still well above the horizon. It was approaching 9:30 when my big moment came on No. 4, just 230 yards. My golf muscles returned and I made a useful swing with my way-too-flat lie angle rental driver and hit the ball hole high to the right. I amazingly nearly holed a 25-yard chip-and-run to just tap-in range that even a shaggy green could not prevent me from holing out. A birdie on my fourth hole of tundra golf in Alaska! My golf cup overfloweth with blessings!

Most of the holes made sense for the routing but when we got to the 164-yard, par-3 sixth, the direction of the slightly elevated tee had us looking straight at a tall, skinny evergreen tree 80 yards from the tee, with no green visible as the ground fell away behind it. With no one behind pushing us, I drove up to see that the green was 50 yards past the tree. The play was to hit over or curve around the tree to reach the green. I christened the hole the Tundra Wundra for the riddle it posed. We all lost track of my tee ball and it never materialized up by the green so I fudged my score (another Alaskan first for me) with a scorecard double-bogey. (Mary was finding Alaska to her liking; she also had pars on five and seven, nearly driving the green on the latter as she challenged trees down the left side.)

If you do anything in Alaska, see Mount Denali, the highest mountain in North America at 20,310 feet. Temperature at the top in July likely zero degrees. Only 30 percent of visitors see Denali because of cloud coverage. (Photo by Cliff Schrock, taken on iPhone viewed through binoculars.)

As we got to the ninth green, it was nearing 10:30 p.m. but the sun was still above the treeline. We were giddy at the thought we could play another nine and still have enough light to do so. But having achieved our goal and with our Midwest and East Coast body clocks telling us it was really 1:30/2:30 a.m., we held off. Mount Denali awaited us after all in coming days and rest would be needed! But we couldn’t stop being amazed at how awesome it would be to live in Alaska for the summer and basically play anytime of the day. The funny statistical analysis was that I shot in Alaska what I shoot anywhere for nine; had an eight-over 42, with a birdie, two pars, three bogeys, and three doubles. I’d hit six of seven fairways, had four GIR and 18 putts. All my normal stuff. (The USGA would be pleased that the Black Diamond scorecard proclaims, “USGA Rules Govern All Play”.)

I grew up a public-course golfer and was more into the on-course golf than in-house grillroom ambience but I could have been fine hanging out a bit in the Black Diamond grillroom with animal heads staring at me, but we drove back talking about how this course experience had been as unique as any you could have in golf. I thought of how with Mary we started our marriage with golf on our honeymoon at Tan-Tar-A Resort in the Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, and 40 years later golf still keeps giving us thrilling experiences. Blessed by good health and longevity, golf will give you experiences as vast and as full of adventure on the course as any sport. Alaskan golf in the land of the midnight sun had been one of our greatest adventures, which we could now tick off the proverbial bucket list.

For a moment I paused from the conversation and looking at views of distant mountain ranges and read the Black Diamond publicity card I’d picked up. There in the blurbs were two claims I could witness to if I was hauled into golf court right then and there.

The first, “Are you rough enough? Tundra Golfing, golf like nowhere else.” The second, “The only thing a golfer needs is more daylight…Alaska! Play anytime! Play at midnight!”

There was a marketing writer to admire. No exaggeration or false hope, no bull. Alaskan golf had delivered plain and simple…and memorably, all night long.