Golf in the river valley

I am going to lead with the honest part: I have never golfed in my life. My decades have been spent on the fire side and the river side of things, not the fairway side, so this page leans on what I have seen and heard rather than birdies I have made. That is exactly why the story sticks with me.

I met a couple of out-of-state vacationers in Stillwater who were staying in town for a few days, and when I asked what they had been up to, they lit up. They were playing golf, they said, at a course called Applewood, and they were having a great time. That is the hook: you do not have to be a golfer to enjoy the golf in this valley, and when even the non-golfers are talking about a course, it is worth knowing about.

Applewood Hills Golf Course is the course those vacationers were playing. It is an 18-hole executive course, par 62, a public course at 11840 60th St N, Stillwater, MN 55082. It opened in 1994 and was designed by Neil Wilson. I will leave the design critique to people who can talk courses, but here is what a setup like this means in plain language: shorter, friendlier, and much more doable than a championship track, the kind of place where you can genuinely play a round and still have your afternoon.

It is public, walking is allowed, and the word that keeps coming back from players is approachable. For vacationers staying in Stillwater, that means teeing off in the morning and being on the river by lunch.

Here is why I keep telling this story. Golf can feel like it is not for you until someone hands you the easy version, and an executive par 62 course is the easy version. Shorter holes, fewer shots, less time, fewer rules to care about on your first round. You can walk the whole thing, you can be done in a morning, and you can still spend the afternoon on the river, which I have to say is the right order of priorities anyway.

Should I ever pick up a club, this is where I would start. Not because I have played it, but because everything people say about it, friendly, walkable, doable in half a day, matches how I would want to ease into something I have put off for this long.

The real reason this story made it onto the site is the lifestyle, not the sport. People come to the St. Croix River valley to slow down, and a relaxed course like Applewood minutes from the river means a river weekend has one more thing to do that does not swallow the whole trip.

I will be straight with you the way I always am: I have no stake in the course, no price list, and no tee times to share, because rates and availability change every season and I do not want to send you with stale numbers. Check the course's own website when you are ready to plan. What I can tell you is that the course is real, it is public, it is in Stillwater, and it is the one the vacationers told me about. And if I am being fully honest, meeting those visitors made me wonder whether my own someday has been sitting in Stillwater this whole time.