A Golf Trip To Cragun’s Resort In Minnesota

A Golf Trip To Cragun’s Resort In Minnesota

This past week, I had the opportunity to take a golf trip to Cragun’s Resort and Hotel on Gull Lake near Brainerd, Minnesota.

Cragun’s is a full-service resort. In addition to golf, they’ve got a mile-long beach, tennis, pickleball, yoga classes, volleyball, basketball, biking, boats, water skiing, wake surfing, tubing, kayaking, swimming, fishing, wagon rides, foot golf (I also think I saw disc golf), several restaurants, hotel rooms, individual cabins, and large rental houses. There are things to do for every member of the family.

This summer, Cragun’s has two eighteen-hole courses (The Lehman and the Dutch) and a par three. Opening next summer is an additional nine attached to the Dutch.

Both the Lehman and the Dutch are designed by Minnesota’s native son, Major winner Tom Lehman.

I’ll have full reviews and photo tours of both the Lehman and the Dutch in due course. In short, they are both great strategic courses that challenge better golfers, while still being eminently playable for the rest of us. Conditions on the courses were outstanding. I would love to play them again — especially the Dutch.

The Dutch course is good enough to have hosted a PGA TOUR Canada/ Americas event since 2022. The tour returns next week (August 29 – September 1) for the third playing of the CRMC Championship presented by Gertens (tournament link). Jake Knapp, who won the Mexico Open this year, was the inaugural CRMC Champion (2022).

The trophy is an axe. That’s peak Minnesota (and I mean that in a good way).

If Cragun’s forty-five holes of championship golf are not enough for you and your group, there are numerous other courses in the area, where Cragun’s will be happy to arrange rounds. Minnesota nice apparently means helping your neighbors, even if they are competitors.

“We recommend each other,” said Tim Bauman, Cragun’s Golf Sales manager. “We’re such a small community at the end of the day. We want people to come here and spend money in our community.”

“I’ve got friends who work at Madden’s (a nearby resort) who have kids that are my kids age. I want to see those tax dollars spent in this area. Whether it’s here or Madden’s or Grand View, we want to see that money spent in this community,” Bauman said.

Cragun’s is of course confident that if you stay with them you will want to come back.

And come back they do.

“We have family reunions that have been coming back to Craguns for forty and fifty years,” said Eric Peterson, General Manager at Cragun’s.

The family resort has been around since 1940, although the golf dates only to the late 1990s when Robert Trent Jones Jr. was hired to build the original twenty-seven holes of the Dutch Course. Tom Lehman has been reworking the Dutch over the last several years.

The resort’s founders were Merrill Sr. and Louise Cragun. They turned a plot of tax-forfeited land on Gull Lake into the sprawling resort that it is today. Their son, Merrill Jr. — nicknamed “Dutch” — is the nakesake of the Dutch course. Dutch’s wife Irma, is the nakesake of “Irma’s Kitchen,” one of five excellent restaurants on the property.

The entire resort has a family sort of feel, where everyone is very friendly and welcoming, from the starters at the first tee (very helpful), to the young people in the boat rental shop, to the restaurant staff and down the line.

There is a sense in which Minnesota golf has been overshadowed by some of its neighbors. When many golfers think of northern golf resorts, thoughts naturally turn to places like Sand Valley and Kohler in Wisconsin or Boyne in Michigan.

“I think it just might be the Minnesota way we are,” said Peterson. “We are just a little more subdued. We built great golf and then kind of forgot to tell people about it.”

“But we have a major golf destination in Brainerd that is unique,” Peterson said. “And again, I will talk about other facilities in the area as well. Grand View Lodge on the north end of Gull Lake started in 1916 and built the first course in Minnesota where people would travel to play. It was unheard of. Now the Brainerd area has eight championship courses and more that are just below that level.”

For lodging, Cragun’s has lodge rooms — each of which has balcony or patio overlooking the lake; numerous cabins and rental homes around the golf courses.

The rental home we stayed in was just off one of the holes at the Lehman Course. It could have easily accommodated more than a dozen people.

There are several convenient ways to get to Cragun’s from nearly anywhere in the country. The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is 148 miles away. St. Cloud Regional Airport is 73 miles to the resort. The closest is the Brainerd Lakes Regional AIrport, which is just 17 miles from Cragun’s.

For our part, Mrs. GolfBlogger and I drove from Ann Arbor. We hadn’t seen that end of the country and thought it would be fun to see the countryside instead of flying over it. Outward bound, we drove around Chicago, and stayed overnight in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Then it was on to Cragun’s the next morning. It was an easy drive.

On our arrival, we ate at an off-property restaurant that the folk at Cragun’s had recommended (Minnesota nice again) called Ernie’s At The Lake. It is indeed right on the lake — many people just pulled up to Ernie’s docks in their boats and got out to have a bite to eat (you can do the same thing at Cragun’s).

On the return trip, we decided to take the northern route, heading to Duluth, then across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, crossing the Mackinaw Bridge and driving down through the state. We stopped at a couple of parks alongside Lake Superior, and in Marquette to have patsies for dinner.

Mrs. GolfBlogger and I had a memorable time at Cragun’s Resort. I played golf in the morning, while she enjoyed riding the extensive bicycle trails. At one point, she found herself in a town called Nisswa sixteen miles away, which she said had a really interesting Pioneer Village.

After my rounds — and her rides — we had lunch at the Legacy Grill. Then it was out for a pontoon boat ride around the lake one afternoon, and a lake dinner cruise on their double decker yacht. We also could have just hung out on the sandy beach, gone for a wagon ride or done any of a dozen other activities.

And that’s what I think made Cragun’s Resort notable. It’s a great place for a golfer to take a get in some memorable rounds of golf, while the less golf obsessed (or non-playing) members of the family enjoy other activities. The rest of the day, there’s plenty for the family to do together.

Head over to Craguns.Com for more information on this fun destination.