Broadmoor Golf Club - West

Ross design history and timeline

The West Course descends from the same commission as its sibling. Spencer Penrose engaged Donald Ross in 1916 to lay out eighteen holes for the resort he was building beneath Cheyenne Mountain, and that course opened with the hotel in 1918 as the highest in the United States. Ross built once and did not return. His holes occupied the lower ground nearest the hotel, and they served as a single eighteen until the resort began expanding after the Second World War.

The West Course as it exists took shape in 1964, when Robert Trent Jones Sr. — who had already combined a new nine with nine Ross holes to form the East Course in 1952 — returned to build nine further holes and rework the nine original Ross holes that remained. The resulting eighteen opened as the West. Source accounts of Jones’s dates diverge: the resort gives 1948 for his engagement, 1952 for the East and 1964 for the West, while one architectural history places his construction in the mid-1950s and a widely circulated encyclopedia entry dates the whole expansion to 1965.

The club’s own architect breakdown assigns holes 1 through 6 and 15 through 18 on the West to Ross, with holes 7 through 14 by Jones — ten Ross holes against eight, one more than the East retains. That attribution is disputed: at least one widely consulted reference lists the Ross holes as 1 through 4 and 13 through 18 and gives Jones 5 through 12. The resort publishes hole-by-hole yardages alongside its architect assignments, and its version is followed here.

Unique design characteristics

The West occupies tighter, more enclosed ground than the East. Its corridors are compressed by trees, it turns more often, and its greens sit at steeper angles to the line of play, so that approaches must be shaped into surfaces rather than flown at them. Despite giving up more than three hundred yards to the East, it is frequently judged the harder examination of the two, and the reason is the angles rather than the length.

Ross’s holes account for the opening six and the closing four. The finish is the most distinctive sequence: the 17th is a mid-length par 4, and the round ends on a par 5 of roughly 540 yards defended by large bunkers and a creek crossing near the green — a closing hole that asks for a decision on the second shot rather than simply a long one. That cadence, a short two-shot hole into a reachable but hazard-guarded five, mirrors the Ross-authored close on the East and reflects how the hotel-side acreage anchored both ends of his original routing.

Hole-by-hole documentation for the West is materially thinner than for the East, and detailed published description of green contouring and bunker placement on its individual Ross holes is largely absent from the record.

Historical significance

The West’s claim on Ross scholarship is a quiet one, and it rests on an irony: by the club’s own accounting the course carries more of Ross’s 1918 routing than the East does, yet it has drawn a fraction of the attention. Championship history explains much of the imbalance. The West hosted the 1967 U.S. Amateur, won by Robert B. Dickson by a single stroke over Vinny Giles, and the PGA Cup matches in 1998; the East has taken essentially everything since, including three U.S. Senior Opens and two U.S. Women’s Opens. Ranking panels follow the same pattern, placing the West well down the Colorado order while the East sits near its top.

For students of Ross, the West is therefore the less examined half of a divided design — the portion of an important high-altitude commission that championship golf and the ranking lists have largely passed over, and where the surviving evidence of his routing is correspondingly less picked over.

Current condition and integrity

Integrity on the West carries a caveat the East does not. Jones did not merely add nine holes here in 1964; the resort’s own account states that he reworked the nine original Ross holes that formed the other half of the course. The ten holes credited to Ross today are therefore holes on his routing corridors that passed through Jones’s hands, and the extent of what that rework changed — greens, bunkering, or ground alone — is not documented in published sources. Ross’s presence on the West is best understood as routing and landform rather than as intact detail.

The restoration work that recovered Ross’s bunker idiom at The Broadmoor was directed at the East. Ron Forse’s reshaping, carried out from historical aerial photographs between roughly 2005 and 2007 ahead of the 2008 U.S. Senior Open, is documented on the East Course, where it extended even to the Jones holes. No comparable programme on the West is recorded, and whether its Ross holes received similar treatment is not established in the available sources.

The broader conditions are shared with the East. The course plays at roughly 6,800 feet, tree growth on the corridors is heavier than anything Ross would have seen on open mountain ground in 1918, and the greens exhibit the same mountain-driven misreads, with putts breaking away from the slopes regardless of what the eye reports.

Sources & Notes

The Broadmoor (club site) — “Golf Courses” page, accessed Aug. 2026. The club’s hole-by-hole architect attribution for the West (Ross holes 1–6 and 15–18; Jones 7–14), par 71 and 7,016-yard blue-tee yardage, published alongside per-hole yardages.

The Broadmoor (club site) — “Legacy Golf,” accessed Aug. 2026. The 1916 commission and 1918 opening, and the resort’s account that Jones built nine new holes and reworked the nine remaining Ross holes to form the West in 1964.

Where2Golf — “The Broadmoor Golf Club (West course).” Course character: tighter tree-compressed corridors, more doglegs, steeply-angled greens, roughly 6,800-foot elevation, and the comparison in difficulty with the East despite the shorter card.

Top100GolfCourses.com — “Broadmoor (West).” Colorado ranking context, the ten-Ross/eight-Jones hole split, the ~540-yard creek-crossed finishing par 5, and the 1998 PGA Cup.

USGA championship records — the 1967 U.S. Amateur at the West Course (Robert B. Dickson by one stroke over Marvin “Vinny” Giles III).

LINKS Magazine and Feed the Ball — Ron Forse’s 2005–07 bunker reshaping at The Broadmoor, documented on the East Course. Cited here for the absence of any comparable recorded programme on the West.

Wikipedia — “Broadmoor Golf Club.” Dissenting view on the West’s hole attribution (Ross 1–4 and 13–18, Jones 5–12) and on the expansion date (1965); noted but not followed.

Disputed items. (1) The West hole attribution differs between the club (Ross 1–6, 15–18) and Wikipedia (Ross 1–4, 13–18); the club publishes hole-by-hole yardages beside its assignments and is followed here. (2) The extent of Jones’s 1964 rework of the Ross nine — greens, bunkering, or ground alone — is not documented in published sources, so Ross’s presence is characterised as routing and landform rather than intact detail. (3) Jones’s dates vary across sources as on the East.