Not your typical big-city golf experience

Striking Gold Mountain
Burnsie and I are happy to report that Western Washington has its own version of Bethpage Black, it’s called Gold Mountain, and you won’t need to lug your sleeping bag and Coleman hibachi into the parking lot to get a tee time.

Located near Port Orchard, about 25 miles west of Tacoma, and managed by the city of Bremerton, this is Muni Paradise. Two courses, Cascade and Olympic, sit smack in the middle of a gorgeous forest not too far from the nether reaches of the Puget Sound.

Cascade is the easier of the two but still offers a great collection of holes, with elevated tees, uphill shots, plenty of trees and wildlife visible around almost every bend in the afternoons. It’s always in great shape considering the amount of play it gets, and the best part is the fact that even in September it can be as inexpensive as $25 on weekdays and $29 on weekends. Even in peak season it’s not much more expensive than that.

The Olympic course, however, is the real reason to head out to this complex if you’re a serious golfer. It was designed by John Harbottle and is a cut above the Cascade in every category. The greens are hard and fast and superb. The fairways are excellent. It’s under $40, too.

The holes offer a little bit of everything — plenty of undulation and elevation changes and water comes into play starting at the ninth hole and throughout the back nine. From the tips, this bad boy measures every bit of its 7,073 yards, especially when you tee it in the morning and have to deal with the deep forest dew.

Steve Burns The Olympic Course at the Gold Mountain golf complex near Bremerton, Wash., is one of the best golf bargains in America.

This course is so good that it lured the 2006 U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship and is poised to attract even more tournaments as it grows beyond its relatively young age of 10 years. We can’t wait to see what happens at this hidden, affordable gem.

For the last stop, we headed back toward the “big city” and chose a tried-and-true muni, the conveniently located West Seattle Golf Course.

Worth the wait
This is one of three 18-hole municipal tracks run by the City of Seattle and probably the best of the lot — the other two are Jefferson Park, the course where PGA Tour star Fred Couples learned the game as a child — and Jackson Park.

West Seattle sits on a nice piece of land overlooking the whole city, you can see the snow-covered peak of Rainier on a clear day, and if you’ve got five or six hours to spare and you don’t mind waiting a little while for each shot (or dealing with an occasionally surly pro shop employee),  you’ll have a grand time. The course is usually in fine shape for a muni that only costs $28 to walk ($33 on weekends), although its lack of solid drainage makes it a bit of a quagmire in the winter.

Starting out with a fair, vast par-5, West Seattle doesn’t offer much in terms of mystery, and traditionalists will appreciate its straightforwardness.

Things get more interesting on the back nine, especially the signature 12^th hole, which features a dazzling view of downtown and the Space Needle. Don’t get distracted, though, because you’re going to have to thread a tight tee shot through a chute of trees.

The course closes with five holes in succession that switch back right next to each other, so with the weekend hacks out in full force, you might have yourself a good ol’ time with those community fairways, if you know what we mean.

All in all, though, it’s a pretty sweet city deal that simply requires patience — something that playing in crowded cities all the time has surely already given you plenty of.

For more information on these three courses and nearby accommodations, check out the Web sites for Suncadia, Gold Mountain and West Seattle Golf Course.

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