Player’s Corner PLAY AWAY
Doing the Durango Tango The gem of Southwest Colorado has its own unmistakable beat. By Chris Duthie
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS DUTHIE
FIRST WATCH: With the town and San Juan outcroppings in the distance, Hillcrest Golf Club’s sweeping 370-yard opener doglegs between water and OB ponderosa pines.
“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” —Mae West THE SOMETIMES BAWDY but always brilliant actress provided the mantra I’ve pursued since 2004, the year I returned to a resplendent, tight-knit Southwest Colorado community to restore a spirit that craved Rocky Mountain healing. Today, 17 years later, a second go-round in my hometown of Durango continues to yield a
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transformative, life-enriching lifestyle that I never could have imagined while growing up there in the 1960s and ’70s. So much has changed. Despite its way-offthe-beaten-path locale between Phoenix, Albuquerque, Denver and Salt Lake City, the world has made its way to Durango, a prolific farming and ranching region founded in 1880 by General William Jackson Palmer’s Denver & Rio Grande Railway to take advantage of the area’s booming gold, silver and coal mines. It wasn’t until the late 1960s, however, that Durango began to gain in reputation, status and popularity for its San Juan Mountain panoramas, blissful climate and an untapped bounty of destination amenities and pursuits. Sparking this “discovery” were three critical factors: the 1965 launch of Purgatory Ski Area, which single-handedly transformed Durango into
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a four-season mecca; nearby Mesa Verde National Park, which in 1978 earned a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation for its astonishing collection of Ancestral Puebloan cliff houses; and the saved-from-bankruptcy passenger line of the D&RGR (rebranded in 1980 as the Durango & Silverton Railroad), a cliffs-and-canyons, 45mile journey that follows the Animas River to its headwaters in Silverton. A GOLF TRIFECTA Golf has also become a draw. At the forefront is Hillcrest Golf Club, a 6,727-yard Frank Hummel design routed on a tabletop mesa shared with the campus of Fort Lewis College. Overlooking much of Durango and backdropped by views of the La Plata Mountains and the Animas River Valley, the tradition-steeped layout treats golfers to firstclass conditioning, tree-lined fairways and push-
August/September 2021 | COLORADO AVIDGOLFER
