Best golf courses near Golden, CO

Driving up, this public course in the center of Golden, Colo., seems to hold little promise. The locale is a hodgepodge of urban blight, with remains of a 19th-century clay pit mine edged by a high school, juvenile detention center, water park and fast-food joints. Which is why Jim Engh was the perfect architect to design Fossil Trace. His style, with recessed fairways and greens that twist, turn and funnel shots toward the center, dips beneath the urban landscape and places it out of view. What's more, Engh's emotional architecture aims to surprise and delight golfers. The back nine is one-of-a-kind, with the 11th through 15th playing beneath sandstone bluffs and rock monoliths, particularly on the 12th, where walls of fossils split the fairway and hide the green. Even the fishhook par-5 18th, all grass and water and no rock, is intriguing. Any time a course exceeds expectations, it's a fun day of golf.

When Cherry Hills opened in the early 1920s, it was a ground-breaking design, with the nation’s first par-5 island green and closing back-to-back par 5s, although in championships, the 18th is played as a par 4. In the 1960 U.S. Open, winner Arnold Palmer popularized the idea of a drivable par-4 by going for the first green in every round. Curiously, when Palmer and partner Ed Seay remodeled Cherry Hills in 1976, they lengthened the first hole so no player could duplicate Arnie’s feat. Almost 50 years later, modern equipment has once again made the first hole reachable from the tee. A decade's worth of renovation and individual feature restoration by Tom Doak and Eric Iverson of Renaissance Golf have primed Cherry Hills for the next phase of its illustrious tournament history, which began with the 2023 U.S. Amateur.

Denver Country Club mirrors the experience of many urban courses. When the club moved to its current location in 1905, the property was rural prairie on the outskirts south of what is now downtown Denver. The presence of the country club added prestige to this nascent suburb and influenced the decision of the moneyed class to move in this direction. As the city expanded, it consumed the area surrounding the club and course, and today, located in the heart of Cherry Hills Village, it is enclosed by expensive homes, high rises, shops and restaurants. The course has been tinkered with relentlessly through the decades as the club was never quite settled on how the design, hazards and issues with Cherry Creek, running through the middle of the course, should be handled. It seems to have found some relative peace under the ongoing consultation of Gil Hanse and his team, who have helped dial in the bunkering and course conditions, especially following a comprehensive 2012 renovation, though tree clearing and other adjustments continue. These include the construction of new green complexes at the par-3 7th and lengthened par-3 17th in 2020. There's a lot of golf packed into a small footprint here with the creek coming into play on a third of the holes, and Denver Country Club seems to have found the design recipe to match its priceless setting.

Columbine Country Club was the center of the golf world in the summer of 1967 when it played host to the PGA Championship won by Don January. That was the same year it appeared in our ranking of America’s 200 Toughest Courses. The 1955 Henry Hughes design, with holes running along Dutch Creek and the South Platte River, including one par-4 with an island green, has been quieter nationally but remains a mainstay in Denver private club circles (Hughes, the son of one of Donald Ross’s associates in charge of building The Broadmoor, was the preeminent golf course architect in Colorado during the 1950s and ‘60s). Rees Jones and associate Greg Muirhead remodeled the course in 2020.

Bear Creek Golf Club is the 17th ranked golf course in Colorado.

A classic tree-lined parkland layout, Wellshire is one of few Donald Ross designs west of the Mississippi. This Denver muny hosted the U.S. Amateur Public Links in 1946 and 1959.