Painted Woods Golf Course

Painted Woods takes its name from a stretch of the Missouri River valley that early explorers and fur traders once described in their journals — a riparian woodland that broke the open prairie with startling color in autumn. That historical resonance gives this North Dakota municipal course a sense of place that runs deeper than most layouts of its type. Washburn sits in McLean County, on the eastern bank of Lake Sakakawea, where the dammed Missouri has reshaped the landscape into a series of wide bays and timbered shoreline — terrain that bears almost no resemblance to the flat, featureless prairie that outsiders imagine when they picture this state.