Player’s Corner PLAY AWAY
Acing the Double Diamond For the Club at Crested Butte, adding world-class skiing to great golf has made membership “a no-brainer.” By Andy Bigford
SPRAWLING MAJESTY: Snuggled against the granite cliffs, with views that include the Elk Mountain Range, the Club at Crested Butte is a visual paradise. Adding skiing to golf has made everything look that much better.
COLORADO AVIDGOLFER | April 2021
The club’s second owner had snapped up for members, which until then were primarily two pieces of prime real estate at the base of retired couples from Texas and other points south the ski area, back when it was still relatively afwho summered in Crested Butte. By the 2012fordable. Plans to redevelop were scuttled by the 13 season, they’d persuaded the owners to turn Great Recession, and the property sat largely idle. a tiny portion of the structure into a “temporary” Then along came Mike Swan, who arrived in spring ski meeting place for members. With a robust 2006, fresh off graduation from Virginia Tech, imresponse, that 800-square-foot nook eventually probably imagining a career as both a golf and grew to the fill entire building, which now houses ski pro. First brought on to handle carts and bags, by 2011 he’d worked himself up to head pro, while still spending his winter “off-seasons” teaching skiing at Crested Butte. Swan would look fondly upon the club’s unused 11,000-squarefoot building, sited 50 yards from the Red Lady Express Lift, as he made his ski rounds. Teaming with club GM Brad Bogard, they envisioned THE ONE AND ONLY: The Club at Crested what a high-end, baseButte is the only golf course in town. area ski club might mean
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PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE CLUB AT CRESTED BUTTE
THE ROBERT TRENT JONES JR. course at the Club at Crested Butte, snuggled up against the steep granite cliffs shielding the slopes of the ski area above, is perhaps the “best unknown” mountain course in Colorado. Opened back in 1984, Trent Jones Jr. didn’t force the layout into the mountainside, though the signature 13th plummets roughly 200 feet. The designer, fortuitously, had a free hand sketching the course before the surrounding Skyland neighborhood was built, and his touches include bunkers that emulate melting snow, plenty of water hazards, and mostly unspoiled views of the butte, the Elk Mountain Range and the surrounding valley. But even with the formidable 9,000-square-foot Skyland clubhouse, an aquatics center, tennis courts, fitness facility and trout-stocked ponds, its remote location and short golf season left it to struggle for decades to fill the membership rolls. Through two owners and into the current third, selling out the 395 memberships called for in the bylaws came to be viewed as something of an impossible dream. That is until the club finally decided to fuse itself to the ski slopes looming above it in a way that’s unique in Colorado—and even the country.
