The Telluride Bentgrass Festival

The draw and beauty of Telluride Golf Club

Jon Rizzi | Photos © By Dick Durrance II

Tucked into a box canyon in the San Juans, the most beautiful dead-end in America regularly draws music lovers, movie buffs, multiple-home owners—and more and more golfers.

Hole No. 17

Reaching the gold tee of the par-3 17th hole at Telluride Golf Club requires a climb of 92 steps from the cartpath. This hike doesn’t compare to ascending Palmyra Peak, El Diente or the dozens of other 13ers and 14ers ringing the course, but it does reward you with a sweeping panorama of the San Miguel range of the Southern San Juans and the aspen- and pine-encircled green 137 yards away and 100 feet below. An easy pitching wedge lets you add your own pretty white dollop to the tableau.

In many ways this passage to the course’s penultimate hole suggests the trip to Telluride itself. Nestled in a box canyon in the Uncompahgre National Forest, this former mining boomtown sits some 360 miles southwest of Denver. But getting there—in six hours by car or in an hour by plane to Telluride airport—is most definitely worth the effort.

I discover this over a July weekend where I both fly and drive, landing in Montrose to visit Jay and Mabel Grant, my girlfriend’s parents, whose car their daughter, Jo, and I pilot over the Dallas Divide. We are destined for Mountain Village, Telluride’s younger, more luxurious sibling. A free gondola lift connects the two towns, and after checking in at the sumptuous, intimate Inn at Lost Creek, we won’t need the car again.

The 32-room inn, which also houses Siam’s Talay Grille and its delectably haute “Thai with a twist” cuisine, wants for nothing. The solicitous staff, complete with our own personal concierge, ministers to everything, with the manager going so far as to learn a few words in Jo’s second language of Japanese. A phone call arranges for a private rooftop hot tub beneath the glow of a full moon—an indulgence both romantic and recuperative after a day of golf and traversing the area’s scenic latticework of switchbacks and single-track.

The Inn at Lost Creek recently became part of Telluride Ski and Golf (Telski), the company that owns both North America’s No. 1 ski resort, as voted by Condé Nast Traveler’s readers, and one of its highest golf courses, at over 9,500 feet above sea level. The year-round Telluride Ski and Golf Club currently has 450 members—84 percent of whom are secondhomeowners— who fall into two categories: Platinum ($95,000 initiation/$540 monthly dues) and Silver ($50,000/$277). Both receive degrees of priority and privilege to numerous amenities, including an hour to ski before the public can, exclusive tee times between 8 and 10:30 a.m. and access to The Golden Door Spa at The Peaks Resort. The general public, as well as guests of The Inn at Lost Creek and other area hotels can all play the course after 10:30.

In 2003, Telski’s current owner, Chuck Horning, a somewhat eccentric California rancher who cuts his own hair and chairs Newport Federal Financial, bought the property, which he likens to “operating a large, very complicated ranch.” After investing untold millions in developing Mountain Village, real estate and expanding the ski area and its amenities, Horning has focused increased attention on what had heretofore been “the stepchild of the ski company.”

He’s talking about the golf operation. “It’s been pretty much ignored,” he tells me during a Calcutta for the club’s Telluride Classic, a member- guest that’s being held in the backyard of a member’s palatial home along the 15th fairway.

Horning is enjoying every minute of the festivities, marveling at superintendent Kevin Calahane’s course conditioning and paying tribute to new PGA Director of Golf Chad Gurney, who has instituted a new schedule for this year’s Telluride Classic: an opening day “shootout” horserace, followed by two days of eight nine-hole rounds using different scoring formats (Modified Chapman, Better Ball, Scramble, etc.) culminating with an awards ceremony featuring a lobster bake and live music.

“You can feel the excitement,” Horning says. “This is great stuff. It’s exactly the kind of event that will bring members together and guests to come back and join.”

I don’t compete in the Classic, but after playing the course I thought about stroking a check. While Jo partakes of the “tribathalon” (whirlpool, sauna and steam room) and one of the Golden Door Spa’s signature massages, I treat myself to four of the most sanguine hours I’ve enjoyed with 14 of my closest friends.

Hole No. 7

Sanguine, alas, doesn’t describe the relationship between the original developer and the course architect, who quit the job a year before the course opened in 1992 after one too many compromises and refused to have his name associated with the project. The rift may have left the 9,300-foot-high course a tad short on par (70) and yardage (6,574). But it’s long on fun and challenge.

The fun begins on the first tee with a 377- yard downhill par-4 that’s almost drivable. The first two of the course’s six par-3s follow, with a view of 13,320-foot Palmyra Peak (and the ski run dropping off it) highlighting No. 3. It almost seems that far to carry the junk on the fourth, the toughest hole on the front.

Mountain views—including the one of Mount Wilson immortalized on cans of Coors— define the back-to-back par-5s on holes 5 and 6, while the course’s most controversial hole comes on No. 7. The aforementioned architect designed the hole to be longer; instead, the developer put in a road, leaving a 254-yard par-4 over a lake that allows a layup but begs you to drive the sloping green guarded by sand on three sides. What some may call an error, I call an eagle opportunity.

After that comes the course’s longest hole at 635 yards, then a perky par-3 to finish the front nine. After seeing mansion upon mansion along the fairways, I’m surprised to see the ancient barn bestriding the 10th. It belonged to the property’s original rancher and served as the resort’s original Nordic center.

Hole No. 10

Although it’s only a par-34, the back nine presents more big-number dangers, thanks to some long carries and uphill shots (No. 12 gives you both right off the tee) and risk-reward doglegs (the snowman-inducing 13th). Three of the next four holes—14, 16 and 17—are uniquely challenging par-3s, while the number-one handicap 15th is an uphill 486-yard par-4 that most reasonable people would play as a par-5.

No. 17 gets the wow factor, but the 207-yard 16th is the one-shotter with the most teeth, requiring a lake carry with a narrow bailout area and a cheeky green.

A clever friend calls Telluride “the most beautiful place you’ll ever tee.” But a 6,574-yard course with six par-3s and a par-4 most players could drive with an iron doesn’t exactly sound like bucket-list golf.

Hole No. 9

Not so, says member Kevin Holbrook. The realtor admits to joking about some of the course’s quirks, “but I have friends who play all over the place—Alotian, Baltusrol, Whisper Rock, Pinehurst—and they tell me to shut up because this is a great place to play golf.”

It is. It’s also a great place to spend a summer weekend. Last June marked the 40th Telluride Bluegrass Festival and September brings the 40th Telluride Film Festival. In between, the town of less than 3,000 now annually hosts an average of 25 different types of festivals— from chamber music to wine to mushrooms to yoga to “nothing”—a “festival” during which locals fete not having a festival by riding naked down the town’s main drag, Colorado Avenue.

GOING ,GOING, GONDOLA: Telluride’s main ride.

Telluride rolls in natural beauty of a different kind. Serrated peaks slice the sky in almost every direction, while russet, vermilion and sienna rock formations wall the town, their rugged configurations inviting hikers, mountain bikers, climbers and four-wheelers. (“People here don’t work out,” a local tells me. “They train.”) At the eastern end of Colorado Avenue, Ingram Falls tumbles 280 feet in three steps from a basin some 2,000 feet above the town. The two prongs of nearby Bridal Veil Falls plummet a memorable 365 feet.

Designated a National Historic Landmark District, the town has preserved the clapboard buildings, brick storefronts and quaint wooden Victorian-era homes and filled them with boutiques, galleries and gourmet restaurants. The town where Butch and Sundance robbed their first bank now lightens the wallets of wellheeled Texans, Californians, and other flatlanders with superb eateries like La Marmotte, Cosmopolitan, Flavor Telluride and the Sheridan Chop House—all of which wine and dine us during the Art + Architecture Weekend.

The go-to dining experience is Allred’s, located at the Station St. Sophia gondola stop. It serves only Telluride Ski and Golf members during winter, but opens to everyone during summer. Dinner comes with postcard views of the peaks, piedmont and the town below.

Allred’s truffle deviled egg appetizer pleases even ovophobes; the pan-roasted alaskan halibut arrives with beans, chorizo, roasted red pepper and marinated fennel; and the only thing better than the beef tenderloin with lobster risotto is the sweet-and-sour stone fruit-glazed Colorado rack of lamb. Complement it with a Super Tuscan and cap it with a sticky toffee cake.

Stomachs full and senses alive, we float on the gondola above a mountainside bathed in alpenglow. The setting sun silhouettes the LaSalle Mountains in faraway Utah as the Mountain Village comes into view. The private hot tub and plush room await.

And tomorrow will bring another shot at eagle on No. 7.

For more on Telluride and Mountain Village, visit tellurideskiresort.com; 800-778-8581 and for more information on the Telluride Bluegrass Festival please visit telluride.net.

Colorado AvidGolfer is the state’s leading resource for golf and the lifestyle that surrounds it. It publishes eight issues annually and proudly delivers daily content via www.coloradoavidgolfer.com. Jon Rizzi is the founding editor and co-owner of this regional golf-related media company producing magazines, web content, tournaments, events and the Golf Passport.