The Story
In the early 1990s, Sunriver Resort set aside some 600 acres of meadow and wetland south of Bend, where the Deschutes and Little Deschutes rivers braid lazily toward each other, and asked Bob Cupp to build something worthy of the ground. What emerged in 1995 was a heathland-style course unlike anything else in the Northwest — and, at 7,683 yards from the tips, the longest golf course in America the day it opened. Golf Digest named it the Best New Resort Course of 1995 before the paint on the clubhouse was dry.
The name is the design philosophy. Crosswater's routing sends golf back and forth over the two rivers and their wetlands again and again, so the water is never an ornament — it is the question being asked on the tee. At roughly 4,200 feet of elevation, the ball flies far and the air stays crisp, with Mt. Bachelor and the Cascades standing on the horizon behind the pines.
Championship golf found the meadow quickly. The PGA Professional National Championship has come four times — 2001, 2007, 2013, and 2017 — and from 2007 through 2010 Crosswater hosted the JELD-WEN Tradition, one of the senior game's five majors, crowning Mark McNulty, Mike Reid, and Fred Funk twice. In 2025 the USGA committed its own future to Sunriver, awarding Crosswater the 2031 U.S. Mid-Amateur and the 2036 U.S. Junior Amateur.
Crosswater remains a private club at the heart of Sunriver Resort, the anchor of central Oregon's golf reputation. For those who play it, the memory is less any single hole than the quiet of the meadow itself — river, pine, mountain, and a course that seems to have been waiting in the grass all along.