The Round That Was Sculpted for the Mountains vs the Round the Mountains Made Themselves

Mountain golf near Asheville hits a fork, and the direction you take says something about what you came here to play. At Reems Creek Golf Club in Weaverville, the fairways roll through bentgrass that a father-and-son design firm brought over from Oxford, England — every knoll placed with intention, every elevation change earning the course its Scottish Highland comparison. The cart is mandatory here. The terrain insists.

Then there's the course no one imported — the one a small mountain town has kept alive since 1929, where tee boxes sit close enough to greens that you can walk between them, and the back nine stretches past a par 6 that runs 747 yards and once held the longest-hole-in-the-world record. Black Mountain Golf Course doesn't carry a design pedigree. It carries something harder to manufacture: ninety-six years of a community refusing to let it go.

The Hawtrees — Martin and Fred, working under Hawtree & Sons out of Oxford — didn't try to flatten these mountains. They sculpted into them. When the course opened in 1989, it brought a design language that had no native equivalent in western North Carolina: deep knolls that punish lazy approach shots, bentgrass surfaces from tee through green, and a routing philosophy borrowed from Scottish Highlands courses where the land rises and falls in ways your yardage book can't fully prepare you for.

The slope tells part of the story. At 133 from the tips with a 71.9 course rating, Reems Creek plays harder than its 6,492 yards suggest. The bentgrass rolls fast. The elevation shifts rewrite club selection on nearly every hole. Tee times spaced twelve minutes apart give each group enough room to absorb what the terrain does to a round — which is to say, it slows you down, and not in a way that frustrates. In a way that recalibrates.

Golf Digest gave it four stars in their "Places to Play" ratings. That recognition landed because of what the Hawtree design asks of you: not power, but precision. Not length, but reading a landscape that wasn't born flat and refuses to pretend otherwise.

By 2019, none of that mattered. Reems Creek was bankrupt — Chapter 7, unplayable. Bunkers had collapsed. Sinkholes had opened. The irrigation system had failed and fairways sat waterlogged. Developers circled. The plan was to close the course and build housing.

Summer Greene and Pamela Faerber didn't come from the golf industry. They were retirees in the surrounding community who understood what losing the course would mean — not just to golfers, but to the character of Weaverville. On December 31, 2019, they purchased it.

What followed was a rebuild, not a renovation. They removed thirty-five bunkers. They replaced the entire irrigation system. They gutted the clubhouse, installed a double-sided fireplace, and opened the Reems Creek Grill as a public bar and restaurant that serves the community whether or not you played eighteen that day. New GPS-equipped cart fleet. Twenty-station driving range with grass and mat options. PGA and LPGA instruction.

The course that a British design firm conceived for these mountains nearly became a subdivision. Two people who had never run a golf operation decided that wasn't going to happen.

Most visiting golfers gravitate toward the designed course — and that instinct is well-founded. Reems Creek is polished, maintained, and the investment is visible from the first tee. The story is legible: someone with deep design knowledge studied this terrain and built something specific for it. You feel that specificity on every approach shot where the bentgrass breaks a direction your eyes didn't predict.

If you play Reems Creek and call that your Asheville golf experience, you've played a course worth playing. Full stop. The Hawtree pedigree is real. The rescue story adds a dimension that most resort-adjacent courses don't carry. Nobody's arguing against it.

But the slope rating at Reems Creek and the 747-yard 17th at Black Mountain aren't testing the same muscle. One course wants to know if you can read what the Hawtrees built into the terrain. The other hands you 747 yards where every club selection, wind read, and lie compounds across more shots than any standard hole asks for — by the time you reach the green, you're not playing the hole you planned on the tee box.

Donald Ross designed the front nine in 1929 — the same Donald Ross who shaped Pinehurst No. 2, who understood that a course should answer to the land it sits on rather than the other way around. The back nine arrived in 1962, its groundbreaking reportedly attended by Billy Graham, and it pushed the course deeper into terrain that doesn't ask permission before throwing a 747-yard par 6 at you.

Hole 17. That's the one. Seven hundred forty-seven yards, par 6, once the longest hole in the world. It sits on the back nine, and it's playable right now. The yardage alone doesn't prepare you — what prepares you is nothing, because the hole plays through a stretch of mountain where the only strategy that holds up is managing your expectations and keeping the ball in front of you.

The course meanders through town. Tee boxes sit close enough to greens that walking is natural when it's allowed (after 1 PM on weekdays and weekends). The rating from the back tees — 68.7 with a 127 slope — reads gentler than Reems Creek on paper. On the ground, the difference is temperament, not difficulty. Reems Creek punishes imprecision. Black Mountain punishes anyone who thinks 6,215 yards through a mountain town should be predictable.

This is a municipal course. The Town of Black Mountain owns it. It has been publicly held and community-operated for nearly a century. There's no investor story here. No private equity rescue. Just a town that decided golf belonged to the people who lived here, and kept deciding that through depressions, wars, and — most recently — a hurricane.

The damage to the golf course exceeded two million dollars. Thirty-five trees came down. The maintenance building was destroyed. Bridges on holes 3 and 5 — both on the Donald Ross front nine — need structural repair that's waiting on FEMA funding.

Here's what you need to know if you're planning a round: the back nine is open and fully playable as of June 2025. The front nine — the Ross-designed nine — remains closed, with the superintendent targeting spring 2026 for reopening. The signature par 6 on hole 17 is on the back nine. You can play it today.

The Town of Black Mountain has invested over $135,000 of its own funds into recovery. The course generated more than one million dollars in revenue in 2024, even operating at reduced capacity. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit — Friends of the Black Mountain Golf Course, organized under Black Mountain Parks and Greenways — raises funds to preserve the course's accessibility, affordability, and historic value.

Every tee time at Black Mountain right now is participation. You're playing a course that a community rebuilt with its own money while waiting for federal help that hasn't fully arrived. The greens fee isn't just access — it's a vote that this course keeps existing.

If you want to go further, the Friends of Black Mountain Golf Course accept donations directly through their site at friendsoftheblackmountaingolfcourse.org — or via PayPal at their hosted donation page. See Below. The money stays local. The mission is simple: keep a ninety-six-year-old public course public.

Back nine ONLY. Front nine (Donald Ross holes) closed pending FEMA-funded bridge repairs on holes 3 and 5. Target reopening: spring 2026. The par-6 17th hole is on the back nine and is playable now.

The Green Tee Grille is on-site. Pro shop is open. The course sits in town — not off a highway exit, not behind a gate. You drive through Black Mountain to get there, which means you'll likely find a reason to stop on the way in or out.

Support the Recovery: Friends of the Black Mountain Golf Course (FBMGC) 501(c)(3) under Black Mountain Parks and Greenways Website: friendsoftheblackmountaingolfcourse.org
Donate: paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=FJQZ3YSXMUSQU Contact: fobmg29@gmail.com

One was rescued from bankruptcy by two retirees who had never run a golf operation and decided a British-designed mountain course wasn't becoming a housing development. The other was rebuilt by a town that watched a hurricane take out bridges, trees, and a maintenance building — and started repairs before the federal money arrived.

The round someone designed, or the round the mountain made. Reems Creek asks whether your precision can match the Hawtrees' intentions. Black Mountain asks whether you can handle 747 yards of a par 6 that's been humbling golfers since before your parents were born.

The mountains hold room for both. Which story you walk into is yours to decide.