Open Season on Fox and Deer

Winter was the season of course foreclosures

Colorado AvidGolfer

Two Colorado courses went into foreclosure during the winter, leaving members and neighboring residents feeling uneasy.

On January 2 The Golf Club at Fox Acres in Red Feather Lakes announced on Facebook “that due to circumstances beyond our control,” it would be “suspending all operations effective immediately.” Situated between the toe-curling Medicine Bow and Rawah ranges 45 minutes northwest of Fort Collins, the 6,262-yard layout opened 30 years ago as part a 459-acre private community developed by Colorado Golf Hall of Famer Ray Stenzel. By 2012, however, it had changed its name from Fox Acres Country Club to The Golf Club at Fox Acres and aggressively courted public play and lodging packages. By the end of the 2013 season, a sheriff ’s sale was announced. According to a member of the Fox Acres Community Services Corporation, “The foreclosure is official. The bank owns it now, and there will be an attempt to open it for the season but that does not look likely.”

A similar fate befell Monument’s King’s Deer Golf Club February 17. Apparently without warning, the 6,717- yard public course shut its doors after the Nebraska-based Exchange Bank foreclosed on the ownership group, locked down the property and dismissed the staff. Residents in the 532-home development, many of whom had just paid their annual golf fee for 2014, worried about property values in a golf-course community without a golf course—or a course with an uncertain future. “That was one of the reasons we bought here,” one resident said of the Redstone Golf layout that opened in 1999. “Almost everybody in the community is very worried about our property values.” King’s Deer is the second recent golf course casualty in northern El Paso County. Nearby Gleaneagle Golf Club closed November 1.

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