Cherokee Hills Golf & Country Club

Murphy sits at the far western tip of North Carolina, deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains where the state tapers to a point between Georgia and Tennessee. It's a genuinely remote corner of Appalachia — small-town, unhurried, surrounded by national forest, ridgelines, and the cold, clear waters of the Hiwassee and Valley Rivers. Golf up here means mountain golf: elevation changes, wooded corridors, views that open unexpectedly across folded terrain, and conditions that shift with the altitude.

Cherokee Hills Golf & Country Club carries the kind of name that fits this landscape — the region was the ancestral homeland of the Cherokee people before the tragic forced removal of the 1830s, and that history runs deep in this corner of the mountains. A country club in a town this size tends to function as a genuine community hub, the place where locals have played the same familiar holes for decades and where the golf is more about enjoyment than pretension.

For visiting golfers, the appeal is the setting itself. Mountain courses in this part of North Carolina reward patience and local knowledge — reading how elevation bends shots, how morning shadows linger in the valleys, and how the surrounding forest keeps things cool well into summer.