Broadmoor Golf Trip Review

The Broadmoor sells itself as a Donald Ross museum piece, and that's only half true, which is the more interesting story. Ross built the original eighteen in 1918, and Robert Trent Jones Sr. came through decades later and grafted nine of his own holes onto nine of Ross's to make the East Course you play today. Half the round is Ross, half is Trent Jones, and Ron Forse spent 2007 and then 2016 unifying the bunkering so the two halves stop arguing with each other stylistically. You can still tell which nine is which if you know what to look for: Ross's greens tilt and deceive at a smaller scale, Trent Jones built bigger and bolder up the mountain side.

That split personality is why East plays the way it does. The front nine, mostly Ross, asks for precision and a specific angle into small, contoured greens. The back nine, Trent Jones's addition, opens up with more elevation change and a par-5 that fights back with water. Add altitude on top of that -- East's tees sit above 6,400 feet -- and a normal seven-iron becomes a six, sometimes a five depending on the wind coming off Cheyenne Mountain.

West is the same two architects working the same land differently, and it plays looser: wider corridors, less manufactured drama, a course that lets you make up for whatever East took out of you. Somebody in every group insists West is actually the better round, usually right after a rough day on East, and that argument never really gets settled. A two-course campus is supposed to give you two different opinions to argue about on the walk back to the room.

Every tee time on property runs through the front desk before it runs through the pro shop, and that's not a marketing line, it's the actual mechanism: book the room first, because the reservation is what makes booking golf possible at all. East fills fast once the window opens, so call the pro shop the same day you lock the room, not the next morning.

Lunch at the Tavern between rounds is the default and there's little reason to look for anything better. It's the room everyone ends up in anyway, informal enough that nobody has to change out of golf clothes, and the bar there does the job of debriefing round one before round two tees off. Save the real dinner for the Summit, and book the table when you book the room, because it fills up the same way the tee sheet does.

Take the caddie. East's greens read differently than they putt, a lesson every first-timer learns the expensive way on the third or fourth green, and a caddie who has stood over those same putts a thousand times saves more strokes than a new driver would. Altitude hits the legs before it hits the scorecard -- round one always feels a half-step slower than it should, and most groups don't find their actual tempo until somewhere on the back nine of round two.

Two nights, two rounds, is the right length for this trip. There used to be a third course on property, a Nicklaus redesign up in the foothills, but it hasn't been playable since a 2015 landslide took it out, and nothing has replaced it as an equivalent round since. Build the trip around East and West, and treat everything else on property, the spa, Garden of the Gods twenty minutes down the road, as what fills the afternoons, not as a third round you're missing out on.