There are private clubs you join because they are close to home, and there are clubs you join precisely because they are not. The Golf Club at Devils Tower, set in the pine-and-rimrock canyon country of northeast Wyoming, belongs firmly to the second category — and its members, spread across some thirty states, would not have it any other way.

Eight miles down the road, Devils Tower National Monument rises 867 feet off the prairie. The formation that Native nations call Bear Lodge became the first national monument in the United States in 1906, and it stands over every round played here. This is not golf arranged beside scenery. It is golf played inside it.

A Course Built Into the Landscape

The course was crafted by Phelps-Atkinson Golf Design under the direction of Kevin Atkinson, ASGCA, and it uses its 150 acres with unusual conviction. Fairways drop through stands of ponderosa pine. Greens sit hard against red-rock outcroppings. Sightlines open across the Bear Lodge Mountains and then close again behind canyon walls, so that the property reveals itself in fragments rather than all at once.

It arrived at its present form gradually. What opened in 1996 as a public nine expanded to eighteen holes in 2005 and turned fully private in 2007. Today it plays to 7,111 yards at par 72, with the 603-yard par-5 fifteenth standing as its longest examination. The routing rewards players who can flight the ball down through elevation change rather than simply hit it far — a distinction the Wyoming wind enforces without much sympathy.

The recognition has followed the architecture. The National Golf Foundation has named the club one of America's Top Facilities. Golf Digest tabbed it a Best New Course. Golfweek has ranked it among the Top 5 Best Private Golf Courses in Wyoming, a position it held again on the 2025 list.

Tarmac to Tee in Ten Minutes

Every destination club eventually has to answer the same practical question: how do members actually get there? Devils Tower's answer has no real equivalent in American golf. Hulett Municipal Airport does not sit near the club. It sits inside the club community itself.

Members and guests land, move their clubs from the aircraft to a cart, and are standing on the first tee in roughly ten minutes. Shuttle service to the clubhouse is available on request, though many arrivals skip the clubhouse entirely and go straight to golf. The club's own short film of the sequence, Fly In. Tee Off., is essentially a documentary of that ten minutes.

The effect is to reframe the geography completely. On a map, northeast Wyoming reads as remote — a long way from anywhere, hemmed in by distance. Measured door to door by air, it becomes one of the most frictionless golf trips in the country, frequently faster than a member's own club across a metropolitan area on a Friday afternoon. Remoteness, it turns out, is a function of how you travel rather than how far you go.

The Case for Staying a While

Membership here is shaped around how destination golf actually behaves. Few members are playing eighteen and driving home. Most treat Devils Tower as a second or third club and visit two, three, or four times a year, with each trip built around an extended stay rather than a single round.

The property is equipped for exactly that. Bunkhouse rooms, fourplex units, and a collection of cabins keep members and their guests on site from the opening tee shot to the last drink of the evening. Guest policy is notably unrestrictive by private-club standards — members may bring as many as eleven guests per visit, which makes the club function as a venue for groups in a way that most private courses quietly discourage.

That last drink has a proper home. The 77 Steakhouse & Saloon anchors the clubhouse, and its centerpiece is a restored 1897 cherrywood bar — a genuine piece of Wyoming history that predates the monument designation next door by nine years. It is the rare clubhouse feature that would be worth seeing even if there were no golf attached to it.

Beyond the Eighteen

Between rounds, the club maintains a regulation-size skeet range, and the surrounding Crook County backcountry supplies the rest: fly fishing, hiking, and trail riding within easy reach of the property. This matters more than it might at a metropolitan club. A destination club lives or dies on what members do with the hours they are not playing, and a property that empties out between rounds does not hold people for four days.

Guest, Member, Homeowner

For those who conclude that two or three trips a year are not enough, there is a further step available. Homesites along the front nine sit within the club's log-home community, where owners build year-round residences or seasonal retreats a short walk from both the first tee and the airstrip.

It completes an unusually compact arc — guest, then member, then resident — and very few clubs anywhere manage to contain all three stages inside a single 150-acre gate. Fewer still do it with an 867-foot monolith standing watch over the back nine, catching the last light long after the fairways below have gone into shadow.

The Golf Club at Devils Tower is among the properties in the LXV network.