Summit Golf Course
Bellaire, Michigan
Grade: B
Teachers’ Comments: Fun and relaxing. More of a friendly neighborhood course feel than an Up North resort.
Summit is one of five courses at the Shanty Creek resort. The others are the Tom Weiskopf-designed Cedar River, the Arnold Palmer-designed Legend, Hawks Eye and Schuss Mountain.
Summit was designed by William Diddel in 1965. It is a parklands course, with a couple of flashes of prairie-links and woodlands routed over some fairly hilly terrain. It’s also a bit of a development course, with holes running past homes, and at a couple of points, cart paths running through neighborhoods.
As such, Summit is missing some of the vibe that I look for when playing resorts in Northern Michigan. Those asphalt road passages shook me out of my Up North Zen.
I’m not sure how Shanty Creek would position Summit in its lineup of courses, but I suspect it would be billed as its family and more casual golfer offering. the fairways are wide, the hazards minimal and the greens inviting.
In many ways, it resembles your favorite neighborhood track.
Summit has four doglegs; the rest are relatively straight shots from tee to green. There’s just one hole where water is a threat. Six holes have fairway bunkers, but I didn’t think them consequental.
The real challenge at Summit lies in navigating the elevation changes that appear on every hole. Some require a carry over a ravine; several are downhill; a few are both downhill and up; none, however, are more than a club uphill.
I think that speaks well to the course’s routing. Diddell found consistent elevation changes without making most of them too strong. It also makes the course walkable. I had not problem hoofing it over the terrain.
My favorite hole was the par five eighth. The tee shot starts straight, and then dives downhill. After a long roll down it rises again to another ridge.
From there, it dives down again, then rises up to a green tucked away behind bunkers to the left and right of the green.
The eighth is a roller coaster of a hole, and perfectly encapsulates the way elevation changes on Summit add interest and challenge.
I played the round under threat of thunderstorms. One caught up with me on the par five eighth, and I spent twenty minutes under the shelter of a nearby home’s front porch while lightning flashed and torrents of rain fell. I was on foot, and so in spite of my dislike of development courses, I was glad for the nearby homes.
Summit is a par 71 that tops out at 6, 276 yards.
| Tee | Yardage | Rating | Slope |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blue | 6, 276 | 70.4 | 131 |
| White | 5, 969 | M: 69.1 W: 75.3 |
M: 127 W: 132 |
| White/Silver Hybrid | 5, 411 | M: 66.4 W:71.8 |
M: 119 W:125 |
| Silver | 4, 879 | M: 63.7 W: 68.3 |
M: 110 W: 117 |
| Red | 4, 757 | M: 63.3 W:67.6 |
M: 109 W: 117 |
Conditions on the day I played were good, but not as good as I expected. From a resort course, I expect resort course conditions. The green were in good shape, as were the tees, but the fairways were inconsistent. There were extensive areas where the fairways were bare; in others, however, they were in good shape.
Good care was taken of the course on the edges, though, which is a particular bugaboo of mine. The areas under trees and just off the fairways are clean, making offline shots recoverable. There aren’t any places where branches intruded on the lines of play.
Summit was a fun course, and a generally relaxing round of golf.
The Summit Golf Course review was published on GolfBlogger.Com on March 14, 2026 from notes and photos taken on a round played in the summer of 2025. For all of GolfBlogger’s Michigan golf course reviews, follow the link.
A photo tour of Shanty Creek Summit follows:
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