On a Tuesday evening in July, the parking lot at Hillcrest fills up with cars that belong to people who haven't touched a driver in years. The Hillcrest Women's Golf Association is finishing its weekly nine, a couple of deer are working the rough near the back nine without much concern for foot traffic, and the lights are on at the clubhouse long after most of the golfers have turned in their carts. Nobody up here is checking whether you have a tee time.
That scene would have looked different five years ago, when Hillcrest read to most non-golfers in Skyridge, Hillcrest, and College Mesa as exactly what its name suggests: a golf course, useful if you golf, invisible if you don't. This year that's no longer an accurate description of the place, and the change didn't happen by accident.
The Course That Used to Keep to Itself
Hillcrest sits on top of the mesa that gives this whole neighborhood its shape, with views back down over the La Plata Mountains and the Animas River Valley. It has been a fixture up here for decades, though even Hillcrest's own materials disagree on whether the club dates to 1954 or 1969. Either way, it's old enough that generations of mesa residents grew up treating it as background scenery rather than a place they'd actually walk into.
That's the part worth noticing this year. The course itself has decided that arrangement no longer makes sense.
What Changed for the 2026 Season
When Hillcrest reopened for the season in March, general manager and director of golf Michael McCloskey told the Durango Herald that the club was working to expand its clubhouse and food and beverage operation specifically to reach people who aren't there to play a round. The stated goal, as the Herald reported it, was turning Hillcrest into more of a community gathering point for the mesa, not just a facility for golfers.
That's a specific, intentional shift, not a marketing line. It shows up in small ways: extended food and beverage hours timed around Memorial Day weekend, a heavier focus on the clubhouse as its own destination, and a general-manager quote about wanting the "non-golf community" to have a reason to walk in the door.
"People are all very excited to write the winter off and focus on summer activities."
That's McCloskey talking about opening day back in March, but it captures the mood that's carried through the whole season. Hillcrest wants August to feel less like a private amenity and more like the kind of place where a Tuesday evening naturally ends up.
The Grille Is Not the Old Snack Bar
Part of what makes this plausible is that Hillcrest actually has something worth walking up the hill for now. The Grille pours local beer, Steamworks and Ska among the taps, and carries a full liquor license alongside cocktails and wine. It's a bar with a view of the Animas Valley, not a hot dog stand with a cash register. As of this summer, the club's own site lists the Grille as open Tuesday through Sunday, with the Lower Snack Bar covering additional hours for people coming off the course earlier in the day.
None of that requires a set of clubs. It requires walking in.
The Calendar Gave Non-Golfers Reasons to Show Up Too
This year's event schedule leaned into that same idea, mixing tournament golf with things a neighbor could attend, volunteer for, or simply watch from the clubhouse patio:
- Across the Border, a tournament held in partnership with First Tee Four Corners at Hillcrest and Piñon Hills, ran the first weekend of May.
- Adaptive Golf, a free program organized by a local nonprofit, has run Thursday mornings at Hillcrest in May, and continues this month, offering programming and transportation support for golfers with disabilities. Volunteers are part of how it runs.
- The Navajo Trail Open, Hillcrest's signature tournament, returned in mid-June and drew the kind of crowd that turns a golf course into a spectator event for a weekend.
- The Chili Pepper Ladies Invitational followed on July 8.
- The Hillcrest Women's Golf Association has kept its Tuesday morning leagues running all season, mixing competitive and non-competitive nine and eighteen-hole groups.
Most of that list has nothing to do with whether you own golf shoes. It's a community calendar that happens to be hosted on a golf course.
You Were Probably Already Using the Mesa Anyway
Here's the part that undercuts the idea that Hillcrest was ever fully separate from the neighborhood around it. The Fort Lewis College Mesa trail system runs directly in town on the same mesa, with route options for a range of ages and skill levels, no golf involved. And in winter, the fairways themselves get pressed into service for something else entirely: Hillcrest offers groomed nordic skiing on the course once the snow sets in, a use that has nothing to do with golf carts or tee times.
So the land was already shared property in practice, even when the clubhouse wasn't. What changed this year is that the invitation finally extended indoors, to the bar stools and the patio tables, not just the open grass.
The Course Answers to the Same Water Restrictions You Do
One more thing ties Hillcrest to the rest of the neighborhood more tightly than a scorecard ever could. In April 2026, as the city of Durango enacted residential water restrictions ahead of a dry spring, McCloskey told the Herald that the course coordinates its water use directly with Durango Public Works and Parks and Recreation, adjusting based on the same city planning that governs everyone else's sprinklers. Hillcrest lets its grass grow a little longer to conserve water, relies on Kentucky bluegrass on the fairways and bentgrass and poa annua on the greens, and can go a couple of days without watering when it needs to.
McCloskey has been at Hillcrest since 2019, but he's heard enough from staff about the tough 2018 drought season, the one that coincided with smoke from the 416 Fire settling over the course, to know what a real dry year looks like there. His read on it stuck with me:
"Golf will never go away."
Meaning even a stressed, browner course in a dry summer doesn't stop mattering to the people who use it. That's not a golf-marketing sentiment. It's a description of how tightly this one piece of land is wound into daily life on the mesa, water restrictions and all.
What This Actually Means If You Live Up Here
The takeaway isn't "go play golf." It's that the biggest piece of shared land in Skyridge, Hillcrest, and College Mesa spent decades functioning like private property with a view, and this year it started acting like a neighborhood amenity instead. The Grille has a real bar and real hours now. The events calendar has stops that don't require a handicap index. The trail system on the mesa was never gated off to begin with. And the course's own water use is tied to the same city restrictions as everyone else's lawn.
If you've lived on the mesa for years and never walked past the pro shop, this is the season that changes the math on that. The deer don't care either way, but the Grille does have a table with your name on it.
For neighbors thinking further ahead, whether that's a move within the mesa or eventually selling a place up here, Alicia Romero at LiveInDurango has spent more than two decades reading exactly this kind of shift in how a Durango neighborhood actually functions day to day, not just how it shows up in a listing description. If a conversation like that is useful down the road, her door's open the same way the Grille's patio is this summer.
