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Where to play golf near Los Angeles? We rank the best public courses

Where to play golf near Los Angeles? We rank the best public courses

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…

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