Chosen Valley Golf Club

Chatfield sits in the Root River valley of southeastern Minnesota, where the landscape breaks dramatically from the flat agricultural plains that dominate much of the state. This is bluff country — wooded ridges, limestone outcroppings, and spring-fed streams carving through coulees — and it gives the region a character closer to Wisconsin's Driftless Area than the Minnesota most visitors picture. The local golf scene here is genuinely rooted in small-town life, the kind where the same families have held memberships for generations.

The name "Chosen Valley" speaks to the landscape directly. Southeastern Minnesota's hill-and-valley terrain tends to produce courses with elevation change, tight tree-lined corridors, and holes that demand more course management than raw distance. Wind behaves differently in a sheltered valley than it does on an open prairie layout, and reading the terrain becomes as important as reading the greens.

Chatfield itself is a quiet community of a few thousand people, about 20 miles south of Rochester. For golfers driving out from the city, Chosen Valley offers the particular satisfaction of a course shaped by its land rather than imposed upon it.