Course Critic

Raven Golf Club at Three Peaks, Silverthorne, Colo.

Round two of last year's Mike Hurdzan-Dana Fry World Invitational Championship was just a few miles north of Keystone Resort, site of the first round. The venue was the then two-year-old Raven Golf Club at Three Peaks in Silverthorne, Colo., a distinct contrast to their pleasant-but-short River Course at Keystone.

Raven (part of Intrawest Golf's international network of courses with the same name) is much longer and stronger. The card says it's 7,413 yards, par 72, from the back tees, but I was told the course can be stretched to 7,600 yards. Raven is meant to be a legitimate championship test. The bunkering demands your attention, both in look and placement, as do the green contours. Former British Open champion Tom Lehman provided some consultation on the design, mostly urging the tightening and toughening of some holes. Not surprisingly, Lehman's marquee name gets top billing in all the club's advertising, but Dana Fry got some headlines of his own by beating Lehman in a nine-hole skins game match at the course's grand opening in 2000.

Raven was a total remodeling of the old Eagles Nest Golf Club, typical of a trend we're seeing in many parts of the country, where established courses get replaced by brand new ones in efforts to stay competitive. (Other examples that quickly come to mind: Brickyard Crossing atop the old Indianapolis 500 course, Pinehurst No. 4 and the two 18s at Sea Island Golf Club).

Eagles Nest had been a Dick Phelps design that had struggled from the very beginning. Nine holes had been built in 1986, but the other nine lay uncompleted for two years after the original developer died in a plane crash. That nine finally opened in 1989. The residential development around the course was slow to grow, and, to my knowledge, the club never got past its temporary clubhouse, so the first hole was always a 160-yard par 3.

I played Eagles Nest about a dozen years ago. Back then, the boast was that the course followed the natural contours of its mountainside setting, which I thought was a nice way of saying that they decided to save money by not blasting rock. I recall a lot of tee shots up over horizons, with no clue as to what was beyond each rise. I remember a lot of very tight holes, where only enough aspens and pines were removed to squeeze in tees, fairways and greens. There didn't seem to be much airspace for play, or sunlight and air circulation to grow grass. Worst of all, I remember a number of strangely-positioned doglegs. The double-dogleg 535-yard par-5 13th had its first turning point just 200 yards off the tee, and even the yardage sheet recommended hitting a 180-yard club on your drive. The intended 18th hole (which was playing as the 15th during my visit) was a steep, blind, sharp dogleg-left par 4 that, when I played it, had been reduced to a 190-yard par 3 with temporary tees out in the landing area.

Thankfully, those holes are long gone. While the front nine of Raven basically follows the old corridors of Eagles Nest, mainly because of established roads and homesites, except for the 10th and part of the 11th, the back nine is entirely different. Holes that used to go up and down slopes now slide laterally across them, and that awful 15th is gone entirely.

On the front, the biggest change is that the 184-yard par-3 eighth now plunges 100 feet downhill. The hole it replaced was a 125-yard par 3 with just a slight drop. It was the prettiest hole at Eagles Nest, featured in many photos, but still entirely too tight. The present ninth follows the old ski-slope-like sixth hole, but whereas Phelps had the second shot over the corner of a pond to a perched green, Hurdzan and Fry placed their green right next to the pond, with the water all along the right collar. Nine is now a 514-yard par 4. Yes, you read that correctly. This par 4 measures 514 yards. It drops at least 150 feet from tee to green, and if you don't achieve your career-long drive on this hole, it's probably because you swung too hard.

The back nine is longer but much flatter. You don't get much advantage by the modest drop in elevation on the 237-yard par-3 12th, and the 213-yard 14th seems to play uphill, although that has to be an optical illusion. I saw a player easily reach the downhill, boomerang-shaped 601-yard par-5 16th in two, then struggle to reach the upgrade 468-yard par-4 17th in three.

Several fairways are bisected by rock-lined streams, most of them established to carry off spring waters that popped up during construction. The stream just before the 15th green is particularly daunting, and I hit one of my all-time best fairway bunker shots over it to within five feet of the pin during the WIC event. But I was above the cup and my birdie putt slipped by. Did I mention that Raven's greens, especially on the back, all break off the mountain slope and are tricky to read?

The crowning touch at Raven are its bunkers. From the pair on the outside turn of the dogleg-left first hole to the diagonal string across the dogleg-left seventh to the framing sets on the 448-yard 18th, the bunker placement was constantly changing and constantly posing different strategic options. I also like their gnarly look, with lots of crooked fingers of turf poking into the sand from all angles. All the publicity says the bunkers were patterned after the style of Alister Mackenzie, and that may be true. But I prefer to think they were created to be in perfect harmony with two other features in this Continental Divide location. The bunkers seem to mimic the erosion patterns evident on mountainsides surrounding Silverthorne, and they're in tune with cloud shadows that drifted across the barren hillsides across the street from the course.

I was very impressed with the Raven Golf Club at Three Peaks. It's a stern test of golf, but never unfair, and it provides a full range of experiences in the Rocky Mountains, from babbling brooks to eagles sightings to elk tracks across a green. What more would you want from a Colorado resort course?

Golf Digest's Ron Whitten, the preeminent golf course architecture critic, will review a course each week for GolfDigest.com.