Unfettered in Cañon City

Given a canvas of montane terrain, Jim Engh breaks the mold with the surreal Four Mile Ranch Golf Club.

 

Colorado’s Banana Belt. Colorado’s Climate Capital. The Cancun of Colorado. The nicknames for the Upper Arkansas Valley sound like so much promotional twaddle—until you see the satellite image from the blizzard of December ’06. As whiteness swathes the entire state, a snow-free, earth-toned freckle appears from the center of its mountainous spine. 

That freckle is Cañon City, and to Ross Jeffery it’s a beauty mark. Jeffery is the soft-spoken, gentlemanly mastermind of Four Mile Ranch, a 1,640-acre master-planned golf community just north of U.S. 50 on the eastern edge of Cañon City. “I’m not saying that it never snows here,” says Jeffery, who saw his share of the white stuff growing up in Burlington, in eastern Colorado, and growing prosperous as a developer in the Roaring Fork Valley. “But we sit in a bowl, just below the Royal Gorge, and compared to the rest of Colorado, it’s always about 10 degrees warmer in the winter and 10 degrees cooler in the summer.”  

Jeffery is banking on this climactic anomaly to help attract outdoorsy suburbanites, empty-nesters and active adults who crave a temperate alternative to the extreme weather of not only Denver and Colorado Springs, but also of Chicago, Arizona, Texas and New York. “We’ve had buyers from all over, not just the Front Range,” he says, citing as the reason the number of visitors who pass through en route to the world-famous gorge and its activity-inspiring surroundings, as well as to Monarch Ski Area and the Sangre de Cristo fourteeners. 

Some even “do time” at Cañon City’s surprisingly engrossing Museum of Colorado Prisons, home to an actual gas chamber and hangman’s noose, cannibal Alfred Packer’s cell and other hoosegow curios. Cañon City has, after all, served as Colorado’s incarceration capital since before statehood, and its facilities now house some 6,000 inmates. But, Jeffery and others contend, the large number of current and retired prison employees who live there makes the Fremont County seat one incredibly safe place to live. 

Come July, it will also be an incredible place to play golf. Given carte blanche by Jeffery as to where to route the course, architect Jim Engh embraced with brio the entire spectrum of the microclimate’s montane topography. It’s where the mountains and plains collide, and elements of alpine terrain, eroded dunes, high plains and high desert express themselves, sometimes all at once. The holes scale ridges, ripple between outcroppings and reveal the ruddy majesty of the distant Sangre de Cristos. 

With so much visual stimuli, Engh saw no need to put bunkers on the course. “They wouldn’t add anything; they’d be a nuisance, not a nuance,” he explains. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t hazards,” he cautions, pointing to the naturally occurring mini-mesas that rise from the fairways. Composed of soft, shale spalls, these “hogbacks” or “mesitas” recall the limestone monoliths Engh left at Fossil Trace Golf Club in Golden—only at about 1/50th the size. Omnipresent on the course, they don’t play as bunkers (you can ground your club without penalty), and hitting from them requires a clean pick, but they won’t scar your club. 

The more punitive shots come from the jagged-edged hardpan and arroyos bestriding the fairways—and from the fairways themselves. As wavy as the tilde in the word “cañon,” they rarely produce a level lie, resulting in a staggering array of shots and stances. “I would never intentionally design something like this,” Engh says, describing the wildly pitched and undulating entrance to the thirteenth green. “But this is how the land was; I thought, that’s cool—I’ll just throw a green dress on it.”

A devotee of Ireland’s links courses—to which he makes numerous annual pilgrimages for inspiration—Engh exhibits a spalpeen’s love for mischief in his layouts. His course canon overflows with blind tee and approach shots, hidden routes to unpredictable, multi-tiered greens with tongues, troughs and enough movement to make three-putts all too common. “But this course pushes the envelope, even for me,” he says. “When I play it, I’m seeing things even I didn’t realize were there. It’s a pirouette course—as you walk to your shot, you’re constantly turning around because there’s 360 degrees of details. You’re always discovering something.”

That sense of discovery permeates the round, which begins on the property’s more desert-like terrain and climbs to the higher perches on the back nine before heading back downhill. You’ll discover even the opening hole, a fairly straightforward-looking, 450-yard par four, gets infinitely tougher the further right you land your tee shot. You lose your view of the green—and the arroyo that protects it to the left. This leads to the first hole with a hogback, which rises from the first landing area of the 600-yard second. Like the other three par fives on the course (numbers 6, 11 and 15), the hole asks for a layup rather than a dart to the pin. In this case, the play is short left, then a 90-degree turn into the green. 

Water comes into play for the first and only time on the third hole in the form of a retention pond that requires a 150-yard carry to reach the green. Four hogbacks dapple the fourth fairway, while the fifth insists on a deep ball and the ability to hit a mid-iron from a quirky lie. The 560-yard sixth exemplifies Engh’s playfulness. The green crouches behind a rock formation that shields all but the flag from the fairway; although the left side appears to be more receptive to a soft approach shot, that side of the green sheds all but the stickiest shots. The play is to the right—hidden from view—where everything funnels toward the hole.

Another funky Engh green—this one that appears to have enormous soup bowls buried beneath it—defines the par-three seventh.   A ridge splits the fairway on the 349-yard eighth; a ball that flies it could find itself propelled onto the green. Don’t fear the tiny fairway on the long, par-four ninth; Engh the illusionist has allowed plenty of room to the left.

“You’ve got to have a sense of humor to enjoy this course,” Engh says before ascending to the 10th tee box. Quirky as the par four and par fives are on 10 and 11, their comic sides don’t compare with the par-three twelfth, where a reverse-Biarritz green suggests, well, buttocks. 

“So, that’s the ‘ass’ hole?” this visitor cracks. 

“No, but it could be the guy who designed it,” Engh laughs.

The highest point on the course—6,300 feet—arrives on the 13th tee, which plunges to a plateau green that seems to float on the horizon. The blind par three that follows echoes the sixth hole’s fortress-like green complex, while the par-five, right-dogleg 15th tucks its wavy green deep into a pocket in the outcroppings.

Four Mile Ranch’s last three holes put an exclamation point on the experience. Sixteen, a par four, drops from tee to green, but requires a shot through an opening cut into a ridge. The dramatic green on the par-three penult sits uphill diagonally from the tee, between two ridges, with a pair of manufactured hogbacks in the foreground. (The only trace of their man-made provenance is their east-west orientation; all the others run north-south.) 

As with many of Engh’s recent creations (Fossil Trace, Pradera, Lakota Canyon), Four Mile Ranch ends with a dramatic par-five finisher, a 580-yard Pandora’s box of hogbacks with an arroyo-fronted green alighted on a shelf against a ridge. It’s a go-for-it hole where eagles and birdies can fly or die.

Over Millers and paper-wrapped burgers at the Owl Cigar Store on Main Street, Engh professes his affection for the project. “I love the small-town atmosphere here; it reminds me of where I grew up in North Dakota,” says the Dickinson native. “I don’t know if I could move here, but Baby Boomers who can’t afford a second home or a retirement home in Tucson or Vail can get a year-round home here that has a desert and a mountain feel—for a lot less.” 

Four Mile Ranch’s Southwestern-style stucco homes start in the $180,000 range and

will have easy access to one of the more distinct courses in an oeuvre marked by awards and distinction. Unlike Sanctuary, Fossil Trace and Pradera, however, Four Mile Ranch has no “muscle bunkers” or gathering greens that have become somewhat of Engh’s signature. “This course,” he says, “is really unlike anything I’ve done before.”

 

Jon Rizzi is the editor of Colorado AvidGolfer.

Four Mile Ranch

3532 Rio Bravo Drive, Cañon City  

719-269-7444 or 888-851-8686; fourmileranch.com

Four Mile Ranch Golf Club opens July 15.

Green fees: $59 (cart $15 per person) 

Par 72

Yardage*

Black 6,993

Blue 6,286

White 5,395

Red 4,682

 

*Based on preliminary scorecard. This course has not yet been rated.