How Riding Amtrak Across Colorado Gives Access to Great Golf 

What is one to do when you have three months of parental leave, an adorable 3-month-old to care for, and time on your hands? What else: plan a train/golf trip across the United States.

That was my lot this past winter. So using Amtrak’s Passenger Lines, I mapped out golf trips for the U.S. and found one in Colorado that would be worth knocking out this summer – Denver to Winter Park to Grand Junction.

Denver’s City Park Golf Course is three miles south of the 40th and Colorado Station on RTD’s A Line. Fresh off a redesign from Todd Schoeder and Hale Irwin, the new City Park functions both as a golf course and a water retention area. No one should panic when they see City Park underwater during heavy rain.

In his renovation, Schoeder had the unenviable task of going gut-to-studs on a beloved vault of nostalgia. Think Azkaban, but instead of wizard treasure, the previous iteration of City Park was a tightly guarded repository of fond memories for everyone who grew up playing golf in the metro area. Fortunately, you could use a spaghetti wall to route holes on City Park’s 136-acre parcel and you’d still come away with gold medal views of the Denver skyline.

From the tips, the course plays just under 6500 yards. Unfortunately, this means almost everyone plays from the back tees. This is a mistake. At 5900 yards, the Gold Tees (one forward) don’t give you the impression that the par 70 course was stretched to the absolute maximum by any means necessary (crossovers, strangely positioned tee boxes) to facilitate tournament play. From the Gold Tees, great looks at birdie and eagle merge seamlessly with great looks at the Cash Register Building to create a euphoria unique to the Mile High City.

This is all before you pop into the newly constructed clubhouse for post-round drinks. The modern building runs away with the award for Denver’s coolest municipally-owned structure.

Denver is home, and I love living here, but one of the city’s great shortcomings is that only one Amtrak Passenger Line rolls through town. The line is the California Zephyr, which connects an outer suburb of San Francisco to Chicago. If you start at Union Station and hop on the westbound Zephyr, your first stop will be the Fraser/Winter Park Station.

From the whistle-stop (no physical structure), it is a mere seven miles to Pole Creek Golf Club in Tabernash. If the scenery does it for you, and you’re agnostic as to your surroundings being urban or rural (shoutout to my sightseers!), you’re not going to do much better than a City Park to Pole Creek 36-hole day. At City Park, you get the absolute tops in terms of peeping the Denver skyline. At Pole Creek, you’re dead-centered against the Continental Divide.

Nice views are not the only thing Pole Creek has going for it. Designed by Denis Griffiths, the club’s original 18 holes (nine-holers dubbed Meadow and Ranch) opened in 1985, two years before I was born, back when actual dinosaurs roamed the Fraser Valley. Prehistoric mountain layouts are great because they predate the cart-mandatory-due-to-severe-elevation-changes slippery slope that high-altitude golf courses continue to tumble down. Meadow + Ranch is a real golf course. What I mean by that is the layout is walkable.

Want to put a little action on your game at Pole Creek? There is a cash-in-cash-out gross format skins game that is played from the tips on Wednesday mornings. If you have a hundred bucks in your pocket, the course record holder can be rousted from his barstool for a match. All of this is etched into a literal meadow teeming with sage and wildflowers on the floor of a valley set between unimaginably picturesque mountain ranges. This place is very near and dear to my heart.

Or, if you want to utilize thin mountain air and comically elevated tee boxes to blast a drive 400 yards, then take coin-flip odds on rolling your golf cart on the switchbacks that were placed to mitigate speed on the downhill drive to the fairway, Pole Creek also has The Ridge Nine. To each their own; there is truly something for everyone here.

Hopping back on the westbound Zephyr, the ride from Amtrak’s Fraser/Winter Park Station to the Grand Junction Station is six hours. That might sound like a lot, and sure, there are quicker ways to get from Winter Park to Grand Junction, but quicker is not always better. To welcome us to Denver, the conductor said that people travel from all over the world to ride this stretch of rails. I spent all six hours with my face pressed against the window in the observation car.

Redlands Mesa is four miles from the Grand Junction Amtrak Station, and let’s cut right to the chase – it’s one of the 10 best courses in the state. (I won’t say above or below, but I will tell you in my own rankings that it’s sandwiched between Sanctuary and Catamount).

I appreciate Jim Engh’s course design work. I also understand the overarching critique of Engh’s portfolio, that he’s wont to manufacture dramatic golf courses that stand in contrast to significantly less dramatic natural landscapes. That is NOT a problem at Redlands Mesa. Here, Engh didn’t pull any of his (ball funneling to the center of the green after a loose swing on a completely blind shot) punches.

If we yanked the surrounding landscape and put Redlands under a microscope, it would certainly not be categorized as a classic layout. However, in comparison to its natural surroundings – the starting flats of Grand Mesa and the vivid peaks of Colorado National Monument – the course, in all its Jim Engh glory, feels like an exercise in minimalism and restraint. This is true even from the 6800-yard back tees, if you have 200 yards of carry you have to, HAVE TO take it all the way back here.

After taking this trip, I more feel lucky that the one train that does roll through town links up three courses that make for one hell of a golf trip. For those who read this and didn’t balk at eight hours of train time, City Park to Pole Creek to Redlands Mesa is just about the best thing going.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.