Rocky Mountain High

That Colorado is not the first state you think of when considering where to go on a golf vacation either says an awful lot about all the states that do make it to your list, or suggests a failure on the part of the Colorado golf marketing machine to communicate the message that the golf here is worth travelling continents for.

Truth is, of the Centennial State’s 300+ courses, only a handful wouldn’t make the typical urban muni golfer (more used to flat, parallel-running holes) stand motionless in utter amazement. From the Tom Doak-designed Ballyneal Golf Club in the northeast corner of the state to the far west and Jim Engh’s Redlands Mesa, Colorado is packed with golf courses you will play once then hurriedly make plans to visit again.

Among the finest parts of the state in which to tee it up is Grand County, a scenic 90-minute drive northwest of Denver up and over Berthold Pass. Here, in and around Grand Lake and Granby, are four superb mountain courses that together make up a co-marketing initiative known as the Grand Links. Established in 2002, the Grand Links tour comprises Grand Lake GC whose front nine opened in 1962, Headwaters at Granby Ranch currently undergoing a partial redesign by the Nicklaus Design Company, the exposed Grand Elk which is constantly at the mercy of the wind, and Pole Creek which gets many visitor’s vote for the collection’s most beautiful layout.

No one knows who designed Grand Lake’s front nine, but the back is very definitely Dick Phelps who has created more courses in his native state than any other architect. Until 2002-2003, the course was ranked among Colorado’s tightest, the fairway’s narrow chutes sneaking through a dense forest of lodge pole pines. Then the Mountain Pine Beetle showed up. Five millimeters across, the tiny, dark destroyer devours lodge poles like a Doberman demolishes a juicy T-bone, and not long after its arrival in Grand County the landscape began taking on a whole different appearance. Now five years on from the original infestation, Grand Lake is not the tree-lined, steer-inducing, iron-off-the tee layout it once was but an expansive, open-air meadow that has taken the locals some time to get used to.

“We lost something in the region of 100,000 trees,” says Director of Golf Greg Bradford. “It obviously changed the look of the course and while some regulars didn’t like it at first, I think the general opinion now is that we are in better shape than ever.”

Because the turf dries out much quicker now and the greens receive considerably more sunlight, the playing surfaces have benefitted greatly,” adds Bradford. “The views and overall playability of the course have been greatly enhanced too.” Pole Creek, just a short drive south from Granby and 8,600 ft above sea level, has also borne the beetle’s brunt. In 2003, General Manager Larry Burks was driving near Sheep Mountain which looks out over the course and noticed a handful of trees turning a deathly shade of brown. “I knew something catastrophic was about to happen to the forest,” he recalls. “I stood on the 3rd tee of the Ranch Nine and took a picture looking west towards the mountain which is covered entirely with pines. There were a couple of small, brown patches in amongst an ocean of green.” Burks returned to the same spot exactly a year later and re-shot the image. “The contrast was staggering” he says. Now, instead of a few brown dots hiding in the green, finding any sign of life was like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. A whole mountainside of trees numbering hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, was now dead.

The Ranch and Meadow Nines, designed in 1983 by Ron Kirby and Gary Player, were not as seriously affected as Grand Lake perhaps, but that’s not to say observing the demise of the forest hasn’t been hard. “You don’t like to see it” says Burks, “but to be honest the course has benefitted from the increased air flow. It came out of last winter better than any other since I’ve been here, plus the forest was well over 100 years old anyway. Lodge poles don’t normally last that long. It’s just Mother Nature doing her thing.”

The original nines were joined in 1992 by the Denis Griffiths-designed Ridge Nine, which still has sufficient timber edging the fairways for it to be described as ‘tree-lined’ and which, like its near neighbors, starts and finishes at the impressive $3.5 million, 12,000 square foot clubhouse that opened in June.

Thankfully, neither Headwaters nor Grand Elk has suffered at the powerful, sideways-moving jaws of the Mountain Pine Beetle as both enjoy mostly treeless locations either side of Highway 40. Headwaters, originally designed by Mike Asmundson, a one-time associate of Scott Miller with whom he built the resort course at Coeur d’Alene in Idaho, forms part of the 5,000-acre Granby Ranch development. It possesses a 243-room inn, numerous other lodging options, world-class fishing, skiing, and mountain biking at the SolVista Bike Park which hosted the 2009 US Mountain Bike National Championships in July. The course definitely has a look of the Scottish Highlands about it, with sagebrush replacing the heather, but the course conditioning is all-American as are the mile-long freight trains that pass the Par 5 - 7th hole and the Fraser River on the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. Grand Elk, designed primarily by Tripp Davis with help from Craig Stadler, bills itself as a heathland course although the similarities between it and classic heathland tracks like Sunningdale or Swinley Forest near London are few. That matters not a lot, of course. What does is that Grand Elk is a challenging, entertaining course that demands your cleanest ball-striking if you are to score well, especially when the wind howls across the ‘heath’.

Lodging options are numerous as you’d expect of a destination that caters to tens of thousands of skiers (they don’t take the accommodations down at the end of each winter) but those looking for something extra-special and more private than a hotel room should check out the 69 residences listed on Destinations West’s web site (www.mtnlodging.com) or the 50 offered by Alpine Resort Management (alpineresortproperties.com). Here you’ll find spacious and sophisticated condominium units as well as 7,000+square foot custom-built homes with gourmet kitchens, hot tubs and spectacular views of the Front Range and Continental Divide.

Spend a week in Fairways View (Destinationswest.com) or a Base Camp condo at Granby Ranch (alpineresortproperties.com), play the Grand Links (golfgrandcounty.com) and tell me Colorado doesn’t move several places higher on your list of favorite places to play.