Deer Creek Golf Course is dying.

Where once lay verdant fairways, the 18-hole course near Jefferson County’s Ken Caryl Ranch community is now largely weeds, cattails and long grasses. Nature, inexorably, reclaims its own.

No one has played a legitimate round of golf here in three years. The clubhouse sits empty and forlorn, with a four-tiered fountain at its entry now dry and defunct. And though Deer Creek Golf Course claims on its website that it is merely “closed for renovation” and looks forward “to serving you in the spring,” nobody believes it.

“If you’re rational, you can tell it’s not going to be a golf course again,” said John Walker, president of the Meadow Ranch homeowner’s association, which oversees 333 homes that line portions of the course along a stretch of C-470 near Kipling Street.

Deer Creek’s future is anyone’s guess. It’s a mystery the course’s owner hasn’t unraveled publicly, an unanswered question that’s raised curiosity among the hundreds of people who live near its fairways.

John Aguilar, "Is there a future for this Jefferson County golf course that is overrun with weeds? ", Denver Post, January 3, 2024.