Aurora, CO

Murphy Creek -- A Special Place ... A Simpler Time

Murphy Creek Golf Course, atop a plateau in the high prairie east of the city, in the suburb of Aurora, some 30 miles from downtown Denver. To the west of every hole on Murphy Creek is a great view of sprawling Denver and the front range of the Rocky Mountains. A great view, that is, on days when the red haze hanging over the city isn't too thick.

But golf courses shouldn't be all about views. Indeed, the view to the east of Murphy Creek is that of high tension power lines marching across the high prairie, hardly the stuff of picture postcards. On the day I played, the view alongside most holes on the back nine was of dump trucks and bulldozers installing roads and house pads for a planned residential development.

What Murphy Creek has, and will continue to have after the dust has settled and homes are built (homes that won't block many long-range views, given the nature of the course routing along sloping land) is a knockout set of golf holes available for a remarkably affordable green fee.

Murphy Creek is the latest work of Ken Kavanaugh, a golf architect who is based in Tucson, Ariz., but has created special courses from Chicago to Portland. At Murphy Creek, Ken produced a rustic layout that would fit right in to his native downstate Illinois, with big wide fairways that cling to the contours of the existing land, enormous greens with long, drawn-out slopes and nasty native rough littered with old farm equipment and even an aging barn. But the most notable characteristic of this course are its bunkers, large pits gouged from the earth and decorated with heavy eyebrows of tall fescue along their top edges. Ken freely admits he patterned his bunkers after those developed by man and Mother Nature at Sand Hills Golf Club in Nebraska. Murphy Creek's bunkers are not nearly as deep or as free form as those at Sand Hills, but they seem perfectly suited to a landscape filled with ravines and gullies.

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