DULUTH — This city’s many claims to fame do not include bragging status as a hotbed of miniature golf.
Minnesota mini-golf buffs will find more ambitious layouts in the Twin Cities and in the Brainerd Lakes area. Even within the Northland, Superior
and Proctor
have courses that tend to eclipse anything in Duluth.
Like any self-respecting vacation destination, though, Duluth does do mini golf. Having never previously lifted a rubber putter in the Zenith City, I set out last week to play three very different courses here.
This is, in a sense, Duluth’s most exclusive mini-golf course. According to a staffer at the front desk, typically only Edgewater hotel guests can play here. Among the three courses I played, it’s also the only one with a lake view.
Beyond that, there’s not much to say about this nine-hole course. The design isn’t particularly inspired, and the depressions that serve as hazards are empty of both water and sand. The Tiki theme inspired an impressively sized idol and the imagery painted on a Lift Bridge sculpture left over from the 2005 “Bridging the Decades” project, but visually, the theme pretty much ends there.
The course’s most distinctive feature involves spinners positioned at the beginning of each hole, adding random conditions for players to reckon with. If you obey the spinners’ instructions, it can have major effects on your score. It took me nine attempts to kick the ball into the raised fourth hole after the spinner commanded me to use my foot instead of the putter.
Given that hole and another one, where the spinner told me to toss the ball with my hand and I threw it out of bounds, I posted a score 10 strokes higher than on either of the other two courses.
Could you say this Island Adventure is Duluth’s most challenging mini-golf course? You could.
The miniature golf course at Spirit Mountain’s Adventure Park is not only the most distinctive in the city, it’s unlike any you’ve ever seen. If the Death Star had mini golf, it would look like this.
Duluth architect David Salmela had to be talked into designing a mini-golf course, finally agreeing when “he saw the potential to do something unique,” Spirit Mountain’s then-Executive Director Renee Mattson told the News Tribune when the course opened in 2011.
Except for the bare fact that it involves tapping a ball into a series of holes, Salmela’s course completely abandons the golf aesthetic.
Running in a continuous trench (“like a cattle chute,” the architect himself said), the course is entirely black except for gray trim and white geometric obstacles, which Salmela left it up to Spirit Mountain staff to arrange and which look like they might have been designed on an Apple II running the
Spirit Mountain should capitalize on the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” hype and host a goth golf costume contest on this course, which might be the world’s only mini-golf course Lydia Deetz would actually enjoy playing. High school geometry classes should also try to talk their teachers into bringing them here as a field trip. I was able to score a very respectable 24 just by playing the angles.
Canal Park’s Adventure Zone has concocted
around its gratifyingly traditional mini-golf layout. The North Shore 9 was supposedly inspired by a long-gone course that involved a putting green floating right outside the Duluth Ship Canal — as illustrated in a wall-mounted photo illustration by Harbor Cam mastermind Dennis O’Hara.
In comparison with the stark Salmela setup and the unfussy Edgewater course, the North Shore 9 is an elaborate experience that includes a putt-through North Pier Lighthouse and culminates in a ball-eating Enger Tower. There’s a water element, though it’s not part of the gameplay, while the landscaping rocks come “straight from the shore,” Adventure Zone general manager Dan Brigan told me.
Among the three, this is also the course with the greatest range of hazards and scope for strategy. It also seems to be the busiest, with mini golf included in various package deals sold at the cavernous indoor entertainment center. Additional local flair comes from vintage lampposts that once stood somewhere on the Iron Range, Brigan noted.
While I didn’t score as well as I managed to do at Spirit Mountain (Adventure Zone’s seventh hole, with yet another hole on a hill, was my Waterloo), I appreciated the North Shore 9’s classic mini-golf features. For example, the fourth hole has a two-tier fairway and the eighth hole has a good old looping ramp.
The mini-golf North Shore 9 may not be quite as challenging as the “original” course of legend but inside the safe if cacophonous confines of Adventure Zone, you’re much less likely to get creamed by a saltie while you’re reading the line of your putt.
Arts and entertainment reporter Jay Gabler joined the Duluth News Tribune in 2022. His previous experience includes eight years as a digital producer at The Current (Minnesota Public Radio), four years as theater critic at Minneapolis alt-weekly City Pages, and six years as arts editor at the Twin Cities Daily Planet. He’s a co-founder of pop culture and creative writing blog The Tangential; he’s also a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the Minnesota Film Critics Alliance. You can reach him at jgabler@duluthnews.com or 218-279-5536.
PARKVILLE, Mo. — One metro girls golf team is making life on the links look easy.The girls at Park Hill South High School are working toward their bigge
US Presidents Cup captain Jim Furyk has told a reporter who proposed that the Presidents Cup needed the Internationals to win in Montreal for the betterment of