Hillcrest Country Club
Designed by A. V. Macan
History
Boise’s business community had grown restless by the late 1930s, its golfing families making do with municipal courses while cities of comparable size claimed private clubs of their own. That restlessness found its resolution in 1940, when a group of local members set about establishing Hillcrest Country Club on a rolling parcel above the city, giving Idaho’s capital a private course to call its own.
The commission went to A. V. Macan, the Irish-born, Canadian-trained architect who by then had built a substantial reputation across the Pacific Northwest. Macan had a habit of working land rather than reshaping it wholesale, and Hillcrest’s site — bench land overlooking the Boise valley — suited that instinct. He arrived with decades of design work already behind him, much of it earned through an apprenticeship in match play rather than formal training, and Hillcrest became one of the relatively few Idaho examples of his work, a westward outpost of the golf philosophy he’d been refining in Seattle, Victoria, and Vancouver.
In the decades since its founding, Hillcrest has remained the private domain of the same membership tradition that built it, weathering the ordinary cycles of maintenance and modest updates that keep a Depression-era course playable into the present century. It has stood, through all of it, as one of Boise’s enduring links to a golf architect whose name carries far more weight on the coast than it does in the Rockies — making Hillcrest something of a quiet outlier in the Macan portfolio, and a fixture of Boise’s private club history for over eighty years.
Playing Notes
Bring your full bag and expect to use most of it — Hillcrest plays across enough elevation change that club selection on approach shots will vary hole to hole, even when the yardage looks routine on the card. Boise's dry, breezy afternoons can push shots offline more than you'd think, so pay attention to wind before committing to a line, especially on longer par 4s. The layout is walkable if you're prepared for some uphill stretches, though many members take carts given the terrain shifts throughout the round. Greens here tend to run true but firm up as the day heats up, so putts that look straightforward in the morning may release more than expected by afternoon. This is a course where accuracy off the tee matters more than raw distance — tree lines and terrain funnel play into position rather than punishing every miss outright, but you'll want to prepare mentally for approach shots from uneven stances. Comfortable shoes, sun protection, and a game plan for reading elevation on and around the greens will serve you well.