Town Rankings / Colorado

The Best Golf Courses in Colorado Springs

Colorado Springs has the deepest golf bench of any town in this batch, and the strangest range: a resort course that just hosted a national senior championship, and a municipal course that was already old when the Wright brothers flew. Between those poles sit a modern private club, a resort club under the Garden of the Gods, and the Broadmoor's second course, which would headline most towns and is a supporting act in its own house.

Pikes Peak watches all of it, which is the local constant. The mountain is in the background of every round in this city and golfers here stop seeing it, the way New Yorkers stop seeing the skyline. Rankings here weigh the golf first, and the golf at the top is championship proven in the present tense, not the historical kind. That decides first place. The argument worth having is about third, and about what a 19th century muni is doing outranking a private club. It is doing it honestly. Read on.

1The Broadmoor East Course

The Broadmoor East hosted the 2025 U.S. Senior Open, which means the USGA recently walked this course, set it up hard, and handed it to fifty year old professionals, and it held up as championship golf. That is the freshest possible evidence in a ranking, and it tops a pedigree that was already long. The East is the resort's flagship for a reason: mountain side golf at altitude with the hotel's full production behind it, and greens that do not care that you are on vacation.

The concession is price and frame. This is resort golf, expensive, produced, with a caddie culture and a dress code in the air, and some golfers will always prefer their golf with less ceremony around it. Ceremony conceded. The course under the ceremony is the best in Colorado Springs, tested at the highest level available to it, within the last year. First place is what recent proof looks like.

2The Broadmoor West Course

The West is the East's sibling, higher up the mountain, tighter and more dramatic in its elevation changes, and on some days the more fun round of the two. Resort guests split into camps about the Broadmoor pair the way brothers' fans split, and the West's camp has real evidence: better views, wilder holes, a mountain course personality the East's championship polish smooths out.

It finishes second because the championship record sits across the range, and because the West's drama comes with a scruffier consistency, the peaks higher and the valleys lower across eighteen holes. As a second course it is extravagant. Most resorts in America would trade their flagship for it and say thank you.

3Patty Jewett Golf Course

Patty Jewett dates from 1898 and claims to be the oldest course west of the Mississippi still in town play, and whether or not the claim survives every historian in America, the fact that the argument exists tells you what this place is. It is the city's municipal front porch, cheap, walkable, tree lined, with Pikes Peak at the end of the fairways, played by generations of Springs golfers who learned the game here and never saw a reason to graduate.

Ranking a muni third, above a private club, needs its defense, so here it is. Patty Jewett's golf is honest old golf, nothing tricked up, and its value is off the charts of this list: a full round for the kind of money the Broadmoor charges for small merchandise. Its concession is conditioning and ambition, both municipal grade. But rankings that ignore what a course means to its town are just architecture scores. This one means more than the course below it, and plays nearly as well.

4Flying Horse Golf Club

Flying Horse is the modern private entry, a Tom Weiskopf design in the new development north of the city, and it is good modern golf: bold, scenic, maintained to private club standard, with the foothills for a backdrop. In a weaker town it would rank second and complain about first.

Here it ranks fourth, which says more about the Broadmoor's depth and Patty Jewett's hold on the city than about Flying Horse. Its concession is newness of identity. It is a fine course attached to a development, and fine courses attached to developments are the most replaceable commodity in American golf. The three above it are not replaceable. That is the whole difference.

5Garden of the Gods Club

The Garden of the Gods Club plays in the most theatrical setting on this list, the red rock formations rising straight off the property, and setting alone nearly drags it up the order. The golf, a resort club round for members and guests of the property, is a level below the Broadmoor pair in test and polish, and it finishes where its golf finishes.

Fifth of five is no disgrace in this field. The concession runs the other way: play it at the right hour, with the rocks lit red and the course emptying out, and you will forgive the ranking entirely and wonder why we bothered with the other four.

Tee it up at Patty Jewett in the early morning, a muni older than the airplane, the Peak going pink above the trees, regulars who have played the same first hole ten thousand times stepping up like it matters. It does. That is Colorado Springs golf in one image, championships at one end of town and 1898 at the other, and the town would not trade either.