Town Rankings / Colorado

The Best Golf Courses in Castle Rock

For twenty one years, Castle Rock was on television every summer. The PGA Tour came to a private course in the pines south of Denver for The International, a tournament with a weird scoring system and a national audience, and a generation of golfers learned the name of this town from a broadcast. The tour left. The course stayed, still private, still the reference point for everything else in Douglas County.

That history bends this ranking. Castle Rock has one famous course, one public course golf people genuinely respect, and two more that fill out a growing suburb's game. We ranked the golf first, which keeps the famous name on top, but the public course below it is closer than the gap in reputation suggests, and on a value argument it wins going away.

1Castle Pines Golf Club

Castle Pines hosted The International for 21 years, and hosting a tour event for two decades does something to a course: it proves the test, year after year, against the best fields that would make the trip. This is Jack Nicklaus era championship golf in the ponderosa pines, private in the full sense, immaculate, and built for a level of player almost nobody reading this is. That is not a criticism. It is the definition of the category.

The concession is total inaccessibility paired with a certain museum quality. The tournament is gone, the crowds are gone, and what remains is a superb private club playing its championship course for members and guests while the town grows up around it. First place here is not debatable on the golf. It is only debatable on whether golf nobody can play should top a town ranking, and our answer, consistently, is yes: the list is about the courses, not the tee sheet.

2The Ridge at Castle Pines North

The Ridge is Castle Pines' public Jim Engh neighbor in the oaks, and it is the best public golf between Denver and Colorado Springs by a comfortable local consensus we share. Engh designs with a sculptor's eye, bold earthwork and dramatic green sites, and at The Ridge that style meets oak covered hills and Front Range views. It plays nothing like a consolation prize for golfers who cannot get on the famous course up the road.

Its concession is that Engh's drama divides people. Some of the shaping reads as excessive to traditionalists, and the course can feel like a ride as much as a walk. Accept the style and this is a top tier public round in Colorado. Reject the style and you will still concede the ambition, which is more than most suburban public courses attempt. Second place, and the first call for any visitor.

3Country Club at Castle Pines

The Country Club at Castle Pines lives, unavoidably, in the shadow of its near namesake, and the confusion between the two clubs has probably sold and unsold memberships for years. On its own terms it is a solid private club course for the residents around it, a step below the championship standard of the famous neighbor and entirely adequate for the member game it serves.

That is both the review and the concession. A club whose identity is partly borrowed from the course up the road starts every comparison at a disadvantage, and the golf does not overturn the comparison. Third, respectably, in a town where third still means a good private round.

4Red Hawk Ridge Golf Course

Red Hawk Ridge is Castle Rock's municipal side of the ledger, the public course in the scrub oak hills where the town's everyday golf happens, priced for regulars and playable for everyone. It is a perfectly decent muni in a state with strong munis, which makes it easy to underrate from a distance and easy to appreciate at the green fee.

It finishes fourth because the three courses above it are private money or bold design, and fourth in this town still buys a fine afternoon. Every suburb climbing the Front Range should have a Red Hawk Ridge. Most have something worse and charge more for it.

The International's old broadcast used to sign off with the pines and the rock itself in frame. The rock is still there, the pines are still there, and the famous fairways sit quiet behind their gate, while across town The Ridge fills its tee sheet with golfers who mostly do not mind at all.