A LINKS ON THE HIGH PRAIRIE: RODEO DUNES · ROGGEN, COLORADO

One hour from downtown Denver, on four thousand acres of old rodeo-stock ranch, Coore & Crenshaw have built something Colorado has never had before — and one of the most strategic golf courses of their career.

BY JJ KEEGAN

Colorado golf has always been defined by what surrounds it. Mountain courses cut into pine. Front Range parkland with a view of the Divide. High-desert layouts on the Western Slope. Rodeo Dunes belongs to none of those families. It sits east of Denver, out past the last subdivision, on ground that ranchers ran rodeo stock across for generations — a sand sheet buried under prairie grass, with dunes rising as much as ninety feet and a hundred and twenty-five miles of Rocky Mountain skyline standing off to the west.

The drive is the first surprise. This is not a pilgrimage. From downtown Denver it is about an hour; from the airport, closer to thirty-five minutes. You leave the interstate, the land flattens out the way eastern Colorado always flattens out, and then it simply stops being flat. That moment — the moment the sand announces itself — is the whole argument for the property.

There is no other golf course in Colorado remotely like it, and there is no other piece of ground in Colorado that could have produced it.

Bill Coore has called the land some of the most gifted he and Ben Crenshaw have come across, and the routing reflects that confidence: fairways and greens needed very little shaping, and much of the course was built by hand, the way the old links of Scotland and Ireland were. What that yields is a walk. Rodeo Dunes is a walking golf course, and it is emphatically a fun one — which is a word that gets undersold in analyzing golf courses. You finish wanting to go again before lunch.

01   THE SANDBORN COLLECTION

Rodeo Dunes is the flagship of Sandborn, Michael Keiser Jr.’s development company, and the portfolio is now well established across three states. Each project follows the same brief that built Bandon and Sand Valley: a sandy site, a minimalist hand, a walking-first golf course, and a destination rather than a single eighteen.

02   WHERE IT SITS IN THE LEDGER

I keep count, so here is the count. Rodeo Dunes is the thirty-ninth new course of the Coore & Crenshaw partnership. I have played twenty-one of them. The partnership has also taken on fifteen renovations, three of which I have seen, and there are nine courses Bill Coore built before Ben Crenshaw joined him, of which I have played three.

THE COORE & CRENSHAW BODY OF WORK, AND MY OWN SCORECARD AGAINST IT

Twenty-seven data points is enough to make a claim with some confidence, and here is mine: this is one of the most strategic golf courses they have ever built.

03   THE GOLF

Strategy at Rodeo Dunes is not decoration. Each hole is genuinely its own proposition as you wind your way through the dunes — there is no stretch where you settle into a rhythm of hitting the same shot from the same angle. The ground keeps changing what it asks for, and the smart play from the tee is rarely the obvious one. Fly it over the bunker off the first tee, and you have an open shot to the green.  Take the obvious route to the wide-open fairway, and your shot to the green is blind.  You are choosing which side of a fairway to attack, which contour to feed off, which miss you can live with, and the penalty for guessing wrong is almost never a lost ball. It is a worse angle. That is the good kind of hard.

The greens deserve their own note, because they are a quiet piece of craftsmanship. They are sized for the shot the architecture anticipates. Where the hole asks for a long approach off uneven footing, the green is generous enough to reward a committed swing. Where you have a wedge in your hand because the design gave you the option of laying back, the target tightens accordingly. Nothing is oversized for effect and nothing is cruel. The scale of each green tells you what the hole thinks you should be holding.

04   GETTING ON

Founder memberships are now $115,000. Founders hold priority access every day from opening until 9 a.m. and again after 2 p.m. — the two windows that matter most on a walking course in Colorado light, and a considerably more useful privilege than a blanket claim on the tee sheet.

The course goes on sale to the public in 2027. All public tee times for 2027 have been reserved – the demand to play this course is that high.  Green fees are $325, with caddie fees set at $150. Play is capped at 120 golfers per day, which is the number that makes the rest of it work: no waiting on the dunes, no group stacked up behind you while you read a green, and enough room between foursomes that the walk stays a walk.

Demand is already well ahead of supply — a second course from Jimmy Craig is under construction, and the property has room for considerably more. But the thing worth saying plainly is that this was built to be played by the public, and in 2027 it will be.

RODEO DUNES

Colorado has waited a long time for a golf course that could not exist anywhere else in the state. It turns out it was sitting an hour east of downtown the whole time, under the grass, where the rodeo stock used to run.

To preview the course, including a picture of course #2 by Jimmy Craig, click here Download

Sources: Rodeo Dunes — The Courses, BizWest: Rodeo Dunes golf resort tees up 2027 public debut, Sandborn