Winter Golf on the Western Slope

A visual essay on cold-weather golf, mountain light, and the quiet rhythm of life in the high country.

Winter golf on Colorado’s Western Slope is its own season. Some mornings the greens are frozen hard as stone, other days the fairways soften just enough to remind you the ground is still alive beneath the cold. We play when the light breaks just right and the weather gives us a brief window. It is golf in its simplest form. Light, breath, and the sound of a good strike echoing across an empty course.

I’ve spent the past few years shaping my voice around the stories of the American West. Ranch life, storms rolling off the peaks, the slow pulse of small towns, the weight of a rope in a working hand. Recently, another thread has started to make itself known. Golf, not in the glossy magazine sense, but as a piece of life woven into the rhythm of the Western Slope.

Out here the game bends around the land. Cattle graze near the rough. Frost clings to the tee boxes. The mountains loom over every shot, reminding you that weather, not man, sets the tone for the day. The course is quiet in winter. No rush. No crowd. Just you, the cold, and the light.

Earlier this season I pulled together a set of images and submitted them to The Golfer’s Journal, a publication that has shaped the culture of the sport for years. Whether they choose to run the work or not, the process opened a new creative space for me. Photographing winter golf pulled me deeper into the idea that the West is more than ranches and ridgelines. It is also the quiet pursuit of a game played against the backdrop of the San Juans.

What follows is a small look at winter golf on the Western Slope. Wide frames, quiet moments, and details that speak to the honesty of the season. Cold hands. Long shadows. A flag moving slow in the afternoon wind. The kind of scenes that remind you why we play, even when the temperature says otherwise.

We never stop playing. The Links at Cobble Creek

Winter has a way of slowing everything down. It strips the game to its bones and gives you a clearer view of what matters. No noise. No rush. Just the landscape and the swing you brought with you that day. Golf becomes meditative in this light. A conversation between the player and the land.

For me, this collection marks the start of something new, another part of Western life worth documenting. A reminder that stories can rise from anywhere if you pay attention to the subtle edges of a season. I will keep exploring this direction as winter unfolds, following the light, the weather, and the quiet corners of the course.

Thanks for reading, and for following along as my work expands into new ground. The West always finds new ways to speak. I am doing my best to listen.

— MVM