# The Best Golf Courses in Durango

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-durango-co/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Colorado


A leading golf course in Colorado. Photo: Jeffrey Beall, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Durango is a train town and a college town that happens to have golf, tucked into the Animas River valley in the southwest corner of Colorado, closer in spirit to the desert than to Denver. The golf matches the place. Three courses, three different Durangos: a private club up in the pines, a valley club north of town, and a hilltop muni that has been the locals' course since the 1930s. Nobody builds a golf trip around Durango alone. People who pass through with clubs, though, do better here than they expect.

This is a thin bench and the ranking will not pretend otherwise. With three anchors, the honest exercise is ordering them by the quality of the golf, then admitting how much access bends the answer for anyone who is not a member somewhere.

## 1Glacier Club

The best golf in the Durango area, played in the pines of the Animas valley, in the kind of mountain quiet that costs money everywhere in Colorado now. Glacier Club is private, residential in character, and built for the setting rather than against it: tall trees, elevation, air that makes the ball carry, and holes that use the valley's shape instead of flattening it. On pure golf, scenery that is part of the test rather than a backdrop, it clears the other two.

The concession writes itself. Private means private, and estimates for clubs of this type in mountain Colorado run well into six figures, labeled as estimates because the club does not publish a menu. A ranking for visiting golfers would have to demote it. A ranking of the best courses, which is what this is, cannot. The pines and the altitude do work here that the valley floor cannot match.

## 2Dalton Ranch Golf Club

Dalton Ranch is the valley option north of town, semi private in feel, the course a Durango golfer with no Glacier connection most likely names as his home game. It plays along the river corridor, flatter and more open than Glacier, with the red cliffs and valley walls doing the visual work. The golf is honest club golf: wide enough to enjoy, defended enough to respect, and conditioned like a place that knows it is the area's main public facing test.

It is second because the ceiling is lower. Dalton Ranch does not have a stretch that stays with you the way mountain golf at its best does, and head to head on the strongest holes Glacier wins. What Dalton Ranch wins is the week. It is the round you can actually arrange, at a price a vacation budget absorbs, and in a three course town that makes it the practical No. 1 for most readers even while it sits here at No. 2.

## 3Hillcrest Golf Club Durango

Hillcrest has been above Durango since the 1930s, the college town course in the literal sense, sitting on the mesa with the town below it. That position is its charm and its identity. You play with Durango spread out underneath, Fort Lewis College energy in the tee sheet, students and retirees and everyone the town actually contains. The golf is modest, older in scale, and entirely unbothered by that.

Rank it last on the test, first on affection, and understand both rankings at once. Hillcrest is not competing with Glacier and does not need to. A course that has served a small mountain town for ninety years, on a hill, at public prices, is doing the most durable job in golf. The visitors will play Dalton. The postcards belong to Glacier. The town belongs to Hillcrest, and the last tee time of a summer evening, with the valley going gold below, is not a bad place to finish last.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.