Fossil Trace Winning Acclaim Despite Grow-In During Drought

Despite its grow-in through one of the region's worst-ever droughts including 43 days when irrigation was not allowed, the new Fossil Trace Golf Club at Golden, Colo., is winning national acclaim after only a few months of operation.

"The final product has just been fantastic," says Charles Fagan, director of parks and recreation for the City of Golden. "It has been very, very well received by the public. I'm very pleased and so is the community. We’ve met all of our revenue projections and then some."

The community's endorsement is proven by the high use of the public, daily fee course. Even the course architect has had trouble getting a tee time. "Last summer you couldn't get on the course. I couldn't even get on the course. I don't think there was a tee time that stayed open," Jim Engh, president of the award-winning James J. Engh Golf Design Group, Castle Rock, Colo., says of the first months of the course's operation.

Nationally, the course has been designated the second best "new public golf course" in the country by a major golf magazine. Green fees at daily fee, 6,831-yard, par 72 course, which remains open through the winter depending on the weather, are $50; $64 with a cart.

The course, located adjacent to the foothills of the Rocky Mountain Front Range, features three distinct landscapes — wooded wetlands, an open area, and the historic remains of a clay mining operation that left behind 20-foot tall sandstone pillars. Five holes can be viewed from the deck of the clubhouse along with the front range of the mountains and the Golden valley. There's even an exhibit of some of the trace fossils found during construction and that can be seen on the course.

The 12th hole is especially unique. After playing through the pillars on the fairway, golfers approach the 64-million-year-old trace fossils of palm fronds and triceratops footprints that are near the green. Several large relics of clay mining equipment have been left on the course to help capture and preserve the history of the area.

"There's nothing like it," Fossil Trace superintendent David Anderson says of the course. "It's very interesting. It plays through wooded wetland areas on four holes, through wide-open areas on other holes, and through the mine and sandstone columns. Nothing is the same."

Design and construction required careful protection of the environment. "The mine site required a great deal of work," Engh relates. "We had to work around the dinosaur fossils that are there. There was a fly ash environmental clean up that had to occur within the mine, which made it a complex situation. There were wetlands in the lower areas where the trees are located. And there were historical studies that had to be done on the structures of the juvenile prison that's there. A fair amount of excavation had to be done in the open areas to give it feature."

While nothing was spared in the design and construction, there wasn't any waste either, Engh says. "It wasn’t a terribly expensive project, but at the end of the day it still took a little bit more doing than your typical golf course."

Engh and Fagan first met in 1991 after Engh had returned to the United States to form his own firm after designing a number of courses in Europe and Asia. "I had heard a rumor that the City of Golden might be thinking of a new golf course," Engh jokes, "so I walked through Charlie Fagan's door and said, 'I do golf courses.' It wasn't quite that simple but by the end of the day we had formed a relationship." Over the next few years, the relationship grew into a contract to design that new golf course.

A native of Dickinson, N.D., Engh, 45, had gone to North Dakota State University in Fargo after high school with the intention of becoming an architect. While working summers as a draftsman for an engineering company in Denver, the job included time on a project to construct a golf course. "From that experience, I decided that golf course architecture was the direction I wanted to go," he says. "I asked some advice on how to proceed and was told to get a landscape architecture degree, so I made plans to change my major and start over at Colorado State University. Then, in order to qualify for in-state tuition in Colorado, I worked in the oil fields for a year and even spent some time working in a ski shop and being a ski bum. I took a lot of turf classes and worked maintenance on courses during the summers. I got a lot of actual construction experience building golf courses," he says of the college years.

After earning his degree in landscape architecture with a concentration in turf grass science and working for a couple of architects in the golf course industry and also for a couple of golf course construction companies, Engh received an offer in 1987 to head up a large golf course design firm based in London. Four years later, he returned to the United States and to Colorado with the plan to start his own firm.

The devastating drought and the fact that irrigation water was cut-off during grow-in, Engh says of the construction of Fossil Trace, "was just another hurdle, and there were a lot of them on that project. It was really a good experience, though. It was a great project and one of the really neat things is that I made a couple of new friends in the process."

A significant factor in why the greens came through the 43 days as well as they did, Engh says, was because of the 15 percent peat in the greensmix. "I specify Dakota Peat on almost all of my projects."

Seeding, which was done in 2002, began on June 3 and was completed on Aug. 27. The water was shut off on Sept. 7 starting a 43-day period when irrigation was not available.

"That's how we went into winter," Anderson recalls. "We had a huge snowfall in early March… 54 inches in one snowstorm. The course was under snow for a week then. The moisture content in that snow was very high. It didn't bring us out of the drought but it did a lot to alleviate the dry conditions and it was the savior for water storage in the mountains."

With irrigation restored and some reseeding done in areas where winterkill had occurred, the grow-in resumed. "The course was in very good shape when it opened for play on July 31," Anderson says. "We have bluegrass fairways and roughs, bluegrass tees and bent greens. The comment from people was that they couldn't believe that this was a brand new course.

"The last three greens that we seeded all germinated and managed to sustain themselves through the 43 days until we were finally able to turn the irrigation back on," Anderson says. "Except for that little bit of winter kill, those three greens managed to hang on and grow-in by themselves. We had one thunderstorm through the summer. It rained 2.5 inches 48 hours before we opened and that was about as much precipitation as we had all summer.

"The peat certainly had something to do with sustaining the greens when we didn't have any water," Anderson says. "This was my sixth grow-in. I've done a lot of greens without peat… with straight sand and they probably wouldn't have made it through the 43 days. I think we’re lucky that we had Dakota Peat in the greensmix. The mix rate was 85-15."

Over a million yards of dirt were moved in the construction of the course, which has severe slope on bunkers and some fairways. Overall, Anderson says of the construction, "Things went really well considering that grow-in came during one of the driest times ever in Colorado."

"As director of golf," Fagan says, "I'm very, very pleased with the project. It was done through the worst drought in the history of Colorado. ACC (American Civil Constructors of Littleton, Colo.) and the architect worked very well together. Everyone did." Tom Briddle's Tectonic firm in Georgeton, Colo, provided the sand and blending.

"We're trying to be in the upper echelon of public golf," Anderson says, "and I believe that we are."