Written by Joel Zuckerman

y trusty road atlas informs me it’s just a short hop of 2,643 miles from beautiful downtown Bluffton to a wide spot in the road called Worley, in the northern reaches of the Idaho panhandle. Or, if air travel is the preferred mode, then a trio of flights will get you there: from Savannah to Atlanta, then on to Salt Lake City, then northwest to Spokane Washington, and a short drive east across the Idaho state border. Despite the somewhat daunting travel requirements, if you love the game, allow this Vagabond Golfer to offer two words of advice: Get Going. Why, you might ask? Two more words will suffice: Circling Raven.

The incredibly beautiful and memorable Circling Raven Golf Club is many, many things, most all of them good. But what it is, above all else, is big. Massive, really. It’s a large scale, links-style prairie-land course set on 100 cultivated acres. But more than 600 acres of fescue, wetlands and Palouse grasses, old-growth forest filled with Ponderosa pines and aspens, and shimmering, endless fields of meadow grass surround the fairways. But set as it is among 345,000 acres of the Coeur d’Alene Reservation, it’s still a relative matchbook on a football field. Turn your head right or left on most every golf hole and you’ll see room for a half dozen more in either direction.

It couldn’t be less like the Lowcountry, which is why the time is right for a visit. The summertime temperatures are delightful, not debilitating. There isn’t a home, condo, road crossing, out-of-bounds stake, or lagoon to be seen. It’s a mesmerizing, all-natural landscape, one of the game’s finest venues in these United States.

Everything about this 7,200 yard Gene Bates design is oversized. The fairways are boulevard-broad, the bunkers gaping, greens generous. The one-shot holes are uniformly daunting, the entire quartet playing some 200 yards in length from the penultimate markers. From the tips they average closer to 220. There’s a bit of sameness, in that they all play downhill, but each of the four, the seventh and thirteenth in particular, playing over gaping chasms of impenetrable vegetation, is a heady experience.

Circling Raven is the pride of the Coeur d’Alene Indian Tribe, and has served as a bit of a booster rocket to what was a moribund tribal economy. It’s yet another superb offering in the nationwide expanse of Native American-owned golf experiences, now stretching coast to coast.

Of course not everyone wanders to Worley for a day on the links, no matter how wonderful the venue might be. Circling Raven is one of the main amenities of the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel located a three minute shuttle ride away. Careful land planning has resulted in a golf experience almost totally isolated from the gaming hall and hotel, a welcome and far-too-rare experience. This correspondent has played casino courses in Mississippi, Nevada and Connecticut, where the glass and brass moneymaker sullies the walk in the park sensibility that the golf experience is supposed to be. Circling Raven, by contrast, is as quiet, natural, riveting and inspiring as, well, a circling raven.

Many of the holes are lovely, though none as fine as the tumbling 15th, a par-4 with a skyline green. This 400-yard gauntlet is backed by a ferocious lateral hazard that compels even the boldest player to reach for one club less. Cloud cover had muted the landscape through our first few forays on the course this past May. But some intermittent sunshine during our final round made the backdrop come alive. Suddenly it was a little bit of Ireland in Idaho, fifty shades of green on the hillsides, in the surrounding forests, through the meadows.

Lewis and Clark passed about 100 hundred miles south of this rugged landscape during the latter stages of their epic cross-continent journey in 1805. Now two centuries later, avid golfers with a similar sense of exploration would be well served in making the far-off trek to Spokane and putting this remarkable course on the itinerary. It’s a delightful stick and ball adventure in its own right.