Splitting Adams

After eight years of anonymity, Eagle’s luxury golf development reboots with a new owner and a chill name—Frost Creek.

Jon Lawrence Pitt

Golf in the vail valley is about to get even better. No, there won’t be another course built or resort developed in the foreseeable future. The painfully slow and expensive EPA regulatory process and a declining number of golfers have seen to that. But Adam’s Mountain Golf Club, perhaps Eagle County’s best-kept golf secret, has undergone a rebrand under new ownership.

Say hello to Frost Creek.

Rebranding any well-known product can be tricky. Think Radio Shack. Oh, you weren’t aware it attempted a rebrand? That’s because about an hour after launching the campaign, it got pulled. In a seriously flawed strategy to become hip, they renamed it “The Shack” and hired Lance Armstrong as their spokesperson. Forget that their middle-aged and technology-challenged core customer simply relied on Radio Shack to have one of “those thingies” that you plug into “this thingy.” Nope, they wanted to plug into a whole new demographic. They’re now in bankruptcy.

It can be particularly tricky when you’re rebranding a golf property. Ask Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle and owner of about 95 percent of the Hawaiian Island of Lana’i, including its two high-end golf courses. The Experience at Koele and the Challenge at Manele, both brawny and provocative beasts as their names suggest, with celebrity architects in Greg Norman and Jack Nicklaus, have new logos and new names. And the new names are….wait for it…Lana’i Golf Koele and Lana’i Golf Manele. A little underwhelming for sure. Sort of a name neutering. And for this, Ellison reportedly not only paid a hefty fee, he also hosted a sunset cruise on his mega-yacht complete with complimentary mai tais.

Chad Brue knows all this.

A 4 handicap and the head of the Denver-based investment group Brue Capital, Brue teamed up with Vail-based entrepreneur Dan Bennett and a number of high-net-worth Denver-area investors to purchase the Adam’s Rib Ranch development in Eagle, which includes the Adams Mountain Country Club and its Tom Weiskopf designed course. Four years ago, at the ripe old age of 37, the former CBRE  wunderkind cashed out of a brilliant career in commercial real estate after he and his team brokered more than $6.2 billion in deals in a single year.

He wanted to see the world. So that’s just what he did. After 150 days of globetrotting with only a rucksack on his back and one very sturdy credit card in his wallet, he returned home and built his own company. Currently, its portfolio includes 77,000 square feet of a new office and retail development called The Lab in downtown Denver in the historic Platte neighborhood and 480,000 square feet of commercial real estate, mostly in Denver.
And now, a pretty little golf Shangri-la in Eagle County.

This guy’s not afraid, so the notion of a total rebrand didn’t phase him.

“Honestly, it wasn’t that challenging because the Adam’s Rib name didn’t have much of a following,” says Brue. “People would ask me ‘Where’s Adam’s Rib?’ Plus we only had 32 members when we bought it so it was pretty easy to manage.”

Among the first orders of business was a name change.

But “Frost” Creek? Why not “Shank” River?

“Definitely the word ‘frost’ had concerns for us. No one with a morning tee time at a mountain course likes to hear that word,” concedes Brue. “ But we learned shortly after we purchased the property that someone had reached out to us and said their great grandfather was buried somewhere on our land and wanted permission to come out and find his headstone.” 

That would be W.E. Frost, an early settler on the property in the 1880s. “We just thought that it would be a great tribute to him and the history of this place,” Brue explains. “Not to mention, Frost Creek is the name of the stream that bisects the property.”

Immediate plans call for improving the non-golf facets of the property. The pool area and sport courts will get attention and a trail system will connect the entire property including the home sites. All with the intent to attract a younger, more family-oriented membership with a broader scope of activities like hiking, biking and fishing on the more than 5 miles of streams and creeks.

What won’t change—other than perhaps adding some length with new tee boxes in the future—is the golf course. 

Simply put, the 18-hole Tom Weiskopf design built in 2007 is nothing short of spectacular.

Start with immaculate perfectly groomed tee boxes and greens that Gary McCord might “wax” eloquent about and beg comparison to the very best in the state. And that’s not so over-the-top when you consider that Frost Creek’s Superintendent, Tim Taagen, interned at Augusta National.

And while Frost Creek is technically a mountain course with some dramatic elevation changes, at only about 6,400 feet above sea level, the weather is generally warmer than the courses closer to Beaver Creek and Vail, and hence the season is a bit longer. Best of all, it avoids the gimmicky trappings—the 140 yard par 3 that drops so far down your ears pop on the cart ride down to the green of some mountain courses—that are often more eye candy than golf hole.

The views, as you would expect, are handsome, and 10 holes play around or adjacent to water. But it’s the layout that commands your attention.

As anyone who has played one of his courses knows, Weiskopf’s signature design element is the drivable par 4, and Frost Creek has two.

The 341-yard downhill par-4 fourth is an “I-didn’t-come-all-the-way-to-Eagle-to-lay-up” hole if you’re feeling frisky, and the smart play on the classic risk-reward 13th is long iron or rescue off the tee leaving a short wedge in. But IQ typically shrinks about 20 points when an amateur steps up to this tee box. Or as the “Tips from the Pro” sheet puts it, “We both know you’re going for it. Make an eagle.” It’s only 297 yards from the member’s tee. Swing hard in case you hit it.

It’s really the tale of two sides, with the front more wide open, right in front of you and quiet enough to hear a tee drop. That’s the result of the nearly 100 home sites being just that: sites, not homes. 

The inward nine is really where the golf course shines and the volume gets cranked up. With a swollen Brush Creek roaring behind lots of native grasses and towering trees, the 13th through the 15th are an impressive stretch, especially the short par 5 14th. A blind uphill drive leaves a vexing conundrum. Will it be 3 wood downhill over the creek protecting the promised land, or a properly laid-up second shot to the end of the fairway? The latter leaves a pitching wedge into a green whose setting is golf portraiture at its most striking, as if Weiskopf channeled Monet when he framed the complex with the best of what Mother Nature has to offer in a mountain setting.

The competition for golfers is stiff up here but Head PGA Professional John McIntyre believes Frost Creek compares favorably with all of it: “From a pure golf perspective, we’re an enjoyable, scoreable, and playable course for a wide range of handicaps. The fairways are mercifully wide but our defense is the putting surfaces which roll at 11.5 typically.”

The nearly 2,700-acre property sports a 40,000-square-foot clubhouse with Olympic-sized pool, tennis court, fishing rights in Brush Creek and a variety of rental and ownership opportunities, including five new construction homes, five member cabins, 91 finished residential lots and a working 1,553-acre ranch.

“It’s like almost nowhere else in the country in that it’s effectively a blank canvas with incredible flexibility because all of the infrastructure’s already in place,” says Garrett Simon, a partner with Meriwether Companies, the Colorado-based company that is managing the golf and development for Brue Capital. “The capital it takes to start something like this from scratch, especially a resort-type property, is grossly prohibitive.”

Former owner Fred Kummer and his HBE Corporation spent an estimated $100 million in acquiring the land and building it out since 1973. While his vision of a exclusive enclave for one-percenters willing to shell out $150,000 to join may have been realized in Aspen or Vail or even Telluride when the development opened in 2007, it didn’t work in Eagle.

“The old model of your grandfather’s country club is a dying breed and marketing concept,” says Brue. As is the notion of writing a check north of a hundred grand for initiation into Grandpa’s club. “Right now, our membership costs significantly less than the other clubs in the Vail Valley,” he says.

While Frost Creek membership is officially “by invitation only,” interested prospects can submit the necessary paperwork, and after review, an invitation is extended or not. Nobody at the club will quote specific initiation fees or dues, but since the Brue purchase for a reported $21 million in March, the club has more than doubled the number of members.

“There really has been a buzz among locals since the announcement was made of an ownership change,” longtime Vail resident and avid golfer James Deighan says.

Value is a big part of it. At one point Kummer had lots priced at $2 million but the new pricing model for those same lots now ranges from $175,000 to $600,000.

“Fred just had overpriced everything,” explains Brue. “He built the course in ’07, the homes in ’08 and the clubhouse in ’09, and was simply a victim of bad timing relative to the economy—and he refused or was unable to change his pricing to reflect the reality of today’s economy.” To underscore his point and new pricing model, all five of the new construction homes are under contract after sitting empty for nearly seven years.

So Mr. Kummer’s developmental downfall in the Rockies could be a Colorado golfer’s windfall. They’re sellin’ real golf club membership value in them thar hills. And, let’s face it: Value never needs rebranding.

After 37 years in radio, Jon Lawrence Pitt now writes mostly about golf. He claims his handicap is poor eye-hand coordination and a weakness for brown liquor. For more information about Frost Creek, visit frostcreek.com or call 888-760-2326.