Town Rankings / Colorado

The Best Golf Courses in Aspen

Aspen is the most expensive town on any list we publish, which makes its golf genuinely strange. The best round in town is private and sits in view of the most photographed mountains in Colorado. The most Aspen round in town is the city course, where a resident plays twilight for thirty dollars. A ranking that only measured architecture would insult the muni. A ranking that only measured access would insult the private course. So we measured the golf first, said so, and let the argument fall where it falls.

Three courses make the bench: the municipal, the private club, and the resort course up the road at Snowmass. It is a short list because Aspen is a ski town that tolerates golf in the summer, not a golf town. The season is brief, the air is thin, and every round is played in a valley that makes golfers feel athletic and rich in roughly equal, misleading measure.

1Maroon Creek Club

Maroon Creek is the private Tom Fazio course by the Maroon Bells, and the setting does something unfair to every other course on this list before a ball is struck. The Bells are the postcard of Colorado, two peaks so perfectly composed they look art directed, and Fazio built his usual polished, expensive test in their shadow. The golf is strong resort private golf: generous off the tee, demanding around the greens, conditioned like a carpet.

The concession is that Fazio polish is a known quantity, and golfers who prize quirk or history will find little of either here. It is also, of course, closed to nearly everyone, with membership economics that need no number attached; estimates put the cost of belonging at the level you would expect in Aspen, which is to say well past six figures to join. First place on golf in a remarkable place. The asterisk is the gate.

2Aspen Golf Club

Aspen Golf Club is a city owned course with $30 resident twilight, and in a town where a burger can cost thirty dollars, that number deserves to be read twice. This is the municipal as civic argument: Aspen, of all places, kept a real course for its own people, priced for the people who work the lifts and pour the drinks in winter. The golf is honest, flat valley floor golf with mountain views doing the heavy lifting, walkable and busy and loved.

Does it beat Maroon Creek as golf? No, and we will not pretend otherwise for the sake of a heartwarming ranking. Conditioning and design both run a tier below. But on value and access it does not just win this list, it laps the field, and if this ranking weighted the day and the dollar the way locals live them, the muni would top it. Second place, with the strongest claim any second place on our site can make.

3Snowmass Club Golf Course

The Snowmass Club course serves the resort village up the valley, a mountain layout for guests and members that plays as the trip add on: ski condo in summer, a round between hikes, altitude inflating everyone's driver numbers into dinner conversation. It does that job competently and the setting, like everything in this valley, is doing unpaid work in every photograph.

Its concession is that it is third in a three horse town by a clear margin on both axes that matter, behind the private course on quality and behind the muni on soul and price. A pleasant round is not an argument. Third is where pleasant rounds in expensive valleys finish.

Come in July, play the muni at twilight for thirty dollars with the light going gold on the peaks, locals walking off their shifts with pushcarts. That is Aspen golf too, and on the right evening it beats the view from behind the gate.