Twin Lakes
You’ve just hit a 9-iron to within 5 feet of the cup and made the putt for a birdie. Your golfing partner just fell down for the fourth time today and is now searching for his pitching wedge under 10 inches of snow. Between the first and second holes of the golf course you came upon a guy who had just pulled a 25-inch lake trout through the ice. You are:
A)Probably drinking too much.
B)Wondering why just once your dream can’t involve Meg Ryan bringing you pizza and a beer, like the dreams normal guys have.
C)Playing 18 holes of ice golf on Twin Lakes Reservoir.
D)Starting to think that maybe 48 ounces was indeed “too much Nyquil,” as your wife keeps saying in that slow, distorted, Amityville Horror voice.
The correct answer, of course, is … E) It’s so cold outside you no longer care if you ever find your balls – even if Titleists do cost $28 a dozen.
Welcome to the most intriguing idea to hit Colorado since relatives blasted the ashes of Hunter Thompson out of a huge cannon near Aspen so the writer’s spirit would ride the wind and dwell, for all eternity, on his neighbor’s roof.
“Generally, we don’t have much trouble finding the golf balls,” said Charlie Gandy, who set up the 18-hole course on the reservoir beneath Mount Elbert and charges about $20 to play a round. Unless you want to drive on the ice in his Jeep. Then it’s $30.
Radar golf balls available
You can use regular golf balls and hope to find them, either resting atop the crust or after locating the hole the ball made in the deep snow and digging until you locate it.
Or you can go high-tech. Gandy has golf balls from California-based Radar Golf Inc. Each ball contains a microchip that can be located with a hand-held tracking device.
“The balls cost $40 a dozen. They come as regular white golf balls, but we paint them blue,” said Gandy, who smiled.
Gandy, 48, owns the Twin Lakes Nordic Lodge along the road that carries brave people up and over Independence Pass and down into the glitz, glamour and cremated remains of strange, rich people that is Aspen.
The problem for Gandy and other Twin Lakes business owners – the general store has a sign in the window that reads “No Shoes? No Shirt? We’ll Throw Caution to the Wind and Serve You Anyway” – is that Independence Pass is closed each winter. This puts Twin Lakes on a dead-end road during the frostbite season.
Enter Gandy, who also is a consultant in the area of active living. He recently convinced officials in a Los Angeles suburb to convert a regular sidewalk surrounding a cemetery into a tree-lined walking trail that is now used daily by hundreds of senior citizens who ignore the irony.
20 inches of ice
“I thought last summer about an ice-golf course,” he said. “I thought about it again early in December when the ice started to form and my friends who are braver than me went skating. They were wearing life jackets.”
No need for the flotation devices these days. A solid 20 inches of ice covers the east lake and the smaller west lake where Gandy has his 18 “greens” spread along a 3-mile perimeter. The par-73 course is a combined 6,045 yards with each hole having a name, including No. 7: Hypothermia Hills.
Each green is a hand-shoveled circle some 8 feet across with a heavy, 8-foot aspen-branch flagstick beside each hole, which Gandy has drilled into the ice with an auger.
“I’m going to get a snow blower and make the greens huge, like at a country club,” he said.
Jim Crossman of Denver played the ice course during a New Year’s stay at Gandy’s lodge. Crossman’s wife, Karen, played too. And their daughter, Emma, drove Gandy’s red Jeep Wrangler (“golf cart”) on the ice. Emma is 10.
“There’s not a whole lot you can hit with a Jeep out there,” Jim Crossman said.
And how was the golf?
“The greens, which are ice, are pretty hard to land a ball on,” Crossman said. “So you’ve got to land short of the green and then hit a little flop shot. But the ice is smooth and the putts roll true.”
Then Crossman, an avid golfer, paused for a moment.
“I had two birdies,” he said.
