St Croix National

Somerset sits in the St. Croix River Valley, just across the Wisconsin border from the Twin Cities metro, and the terrain here is anything but flat. The land rolls with the kind of glacially carved topography that gives golf course architects something genuinely interesting to work with — dramatic elevation changes, wooded ridgelines, and the sort of natural contours that reward course designers who let the land speak.

St. Croix National is a public facility serving a region with a healthy appetite for golf. The Twin Cities market supports a dense, competitive collection of courses on both sides of the Minnesota-Wisconsin line, so layouts here tend to aim for a step above the ordinary to draw players willing to make the short drive east or west. A par 72 on this kind of terrain almost certainly means varied, memorable holes where reading the slope is as important as reading your yardage.

Western Wisconsin's summers are warm but fleeting, which gives rounds here a seasonal urgency — the kind that makes golfers savor a good afternoon on a well-conditioned course while the weather holds.