Looking for the best public-access golf around Los Angeles? If you’re willing to drive a bit, there are several courses available that appear on the Golfweek’s Best rankings of top public-access layouts in each state.
But it’s not as easy as pulling up our state-by-state rankings, which lists California courses that might be a full day’s drive away from Los Angeles. We wanted to focus on courses that – while they might require golfers spend a fair bit of time in the car – are within reasonable driving distance.
For the purpose of this exercise, we limited driving time to within two hours of Los Angeles International Airport. Why two hours? Because it can take a while to get anywhere in Los Angeles, two hours seemed like a reasonable amount of time in a car to reach great golf.
And why LAX? Because that airport is a fair starting point with a reasonable amount of courses to the north, east and south. For the sake of this Los Angeles list, we did not include courses in San Diego to the south or those well to the east in areas such as La Quinta, which might be reached in just over two hours from parts of LA if traffic cooperates at off-peak times.
We used Google Maps for its drive times, keying in LAX on a mid-afternoon that showed no significant traffic slowdowns; take all drive times around Los Angeles with a grain of salt, of course, as backups can be considerable.
It’s worth noting for a city where prices, particularly for private golf, can soar: Two of the courses on this list are bargains. The peak annual green fee at Rustic Canyon is $104 on weekends, and much better deals are available during the week and off-peak times. At the municipal Soule Park, peak weekend tee times are just $49 for walkers.
None of this is to say there aren’t plenty of other worthy places to play around Los Angeles, because there are. For example, players should definitely check out the vibe at Goat Hill Park south of Los Angeles, which narrowly misses out on our list of top courses in California. The purpose of this list is merely to identify which courses around Los Angeles are included among the top 30 courses in a very gifted state by Golfweek’s Best.
Included with this list is a general map of where to find all these courses. Each one on the list below is represented with a number on the map – keep scrolling to see the numbers.
Included with each course is its position in its state on the Golfweek’s Best public-access list. For any course that appears on our other popular rankings lists, those positions are included as well.
A little background: The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them on 10 criteria on a points basis of 1 through 10. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings are averaged to produce all our Golfweek’s Best course rankings.
The courses on this list allow public access in some fashion, be it standard daily green fees, through a resort or by staying at an affiliated hotel. If there’s a will, there’s a tee time – no membership required.
(Google Earth/Golfweek)
Where: Riverside
State ranking 2023: No. 26 public access in California
Designers: Brian Curley, Lee Schmidt, Dr. Gil Morgan
Distance: About an hour and 20 minutes of driving east of LAX
Soule Park in California (Courtesy of Soule Park)
Where: Ojai
State ranking 2023: Tied for No. 24 public access in California
Designers: William F. Bell, Gil Hanse, Jim Wagner
Distance: An hour and 40 minutes northwest of LAX
Trump National Los Angeles (Matthew Simmons/Getty Images)
Where: Rancho Palos Verdes
State ranking 2023: No. 20 public access in California
Designers: Pete Dye
Distance: 40 minutes south of LAX
Pelican Hill’s Ocean North in California (Courtesy of Pelican Hill)
Where: Newport Coast
State ranking 2023: No. 15 public access in California, also No. 113 on Golfweek’s Best list of the top 200 resort courses in the U.S.
Designer: Tom Fazio
Distance: 50 minutes southeast of LAX
Pelican Hill’s Ocean South in California (Courtesy of Pelican Hill)
Where: Newport Coast
State ranking 2023: No. 14 public access in California, also tied for No. 103 on Golfweek’s Best list of the top 200 resort courses in the U.S.
Designer: Tom Fazio
Distance: 50 minutes southeast of LAX
Rustic Canyon in California (Courtesy of Rustic Canyon/Tommy Naccarato)
Where: Moorpark
State ranking 2023: No. 6 public access in California, also tied for No. 169 on Golfweek’s Best list of all modern courses in the U.S. and No. 58 on Golfweek’s Best list of top public-access courses in the U.S.
Designers: Gil Hanse, Jim Wagner, Geoff Shackelford
Distance: About an hour northwest of LAX
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