Sutton Bay Club - South Dakota, U.S.A.

Sutton Bay Club, which lies in the flyspeck town of Agar, 40 miles north of Pierre, is a transcendent golf course in an out-of-the-way place. The course takes its spiritual inspiration from Sand Hills Golf Club, the field-of-dreams prairie links in central Nebraska, which harkens back to Prairie Dunes in Kansas, the first of the great American inland links. While Sand Hills paved the way by proving that a private national club with an other-worldly layout could exist at a seemingly unreachable destination, Sutton Bay is unique in many respects. The course was designed by Graham Marsh, an Australian playing on the Champions Tour, who was shown the property by Mark Amundson, the director of his U.S. design office and a native of South Dakota. Both men were enthralled by the site, which was part of the Sutton family ranch of several thousand acres that dates back to 1896. Opened in 2003, the course is laid out over wind-blown dunes created by glaciers, while the back nine is also flanked on the left by a vast mesa. The fairways bubble and spill through the endless sierras of coffee-colored grasses. Unlike at Sand Hills or conventional links courses, the soil is not sand-based but consists of shale, with thousands of boulders pitting the landscape. This landlocked links also comes with a bay view. The course overlooks Lake Oahe, the immense lake that was formed when the Missouri River was dammed in the 1960s, measuring three miles wide and 230 miles long, and visible from every hole.

Powder Horn Golf Club - Wyoming, U.S.A.

The Powder Horn Golf Club is a semi-private development located at the base of the Bighorn Mountains in Sheridan, 80 miles south of where Custer made his last stand at Little Big Horn. The course consists of three nines designed by Dick Bailey-Mountain, Stag, and Eagle. The Mountain nine features exposed, links-style golf, right down to a replica of the Swilcan Burn Bridge at St. Andrews on the first hole. The Stag nine runs through groves of cottonwoods and incorporates a number of stream crossings and beaver ponds, with the holes revolving around an old red barn. The par-three 15th plays diagonally across Little Goose Creek with the two-tiered green set in what had once been the corral of the old barn behind.