The USGA Women’s Open Championship may wind up today on the East Course at The Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs, Colo. As of this writing, they are in their fifth weather delay. Annika Sorenstam won her first major there in 1995. The East Course has wide fairways with large Donald Ross dome shaped greens. The USGA has toughened up the course with deep thick rough in two cuts bordering the fairways. This course is among just 12 golf courses in North America and the Caribbean to have earned a 5-star rating from Golf Digest.
The tournament course is playing at 7,030 yards, the longest in Women’s Open history. Because the course is over 6,000 feet in elevation, the golf ball travels 10% further in the rarefied air. It is situated on Cheyenne Mountain and has spectacular mountain views. The greens are very difficult to read, and generally break away from the adjacent mountains.
I have wonderful memories of staying at the luxurious 5-Star Broadmoor Hotel and playing the West Course. At 6,800 feet, the West Course is higher in elevation than the East Course. The fairways are tighter with more tree-lined holes. It has more doglegs and steeply-angled greens than the East Course. There are huge sand bunkers and there are water hazards on three of the par 3s.
I remember standing on the tee and not being able to see the fairway as it doglegged down the mountain. It was a terrific thrill to hit a tee shot that seemed to soar upwards forever and then disappear somewhere way down the mountain. Putting on the greens was a different matter.
We were told that all putts break away from the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun. While we constantly looked up to the tower for direction, the greens didn’t always follow this local rule. The women playing in the Open are also having trouble reading the greens. The Shrine is an 80-foot observation tower at 8,136 feet on the side of Cheyenne Mountain that overlooks Colorado Springs, The Broadmoor, the Garden of the Gods and the Pikes Peak area.
The trip to Colorado Springs was also memorable for our white knuckle car trip up the switchback road to Pikes Peak. Looking out the car window the mountain seemed to drop off just a few feet away. The higher we drove up to the 14,000 foot summit, the more severe the drop. In July the summit was still covered with snow.
Katherine Lee Bates was a professor of English history at Wellesley College who was teaching in the summer session at Colorado College when she made the horse and mule carriage trip to the summit. She was so enamored with the view at the peak she wrote the lines to “America the Beautiful.” It was July 22, 1893.
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