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Fox Acres Country Club began in 1960 as Ray Stenzel’s dream of a quiet getaway for a little golf and some fishing for just a few friends. Located in the rolling hills about 45 minutes northwest of Fort Collins, the modest beginnings of this extraordinarily beautiful country club began when Stenzel bought the old, 38-acre Red Feather Silver Fox Farm, complete with a log house, for $12,000. After many of the fox pens, buildings and other debris were cleared away, Stenzel began building his vacation home. He also included a putting green and two pitch-and-putt holes. In 1965, Stenzel hired teaching professional John Cochran to build a nine-hole course. However, with further land acquisition, the plans for a nine-hole course soon grew to a 6,350-yard, par 71, 18-hole course. For nearly 20 years, Stenzel & Cochran worked together, perfecting a course that blends well with its natural, lush environment against the Roosevelt National Forest. Fairways were created by felling trees only when absolutely necessary; rock was dynamited and removed, only to be replaced with tons of earth and sand; and among the swells and slopes of greens and fairways, the rippling man-made lakes create forbidding water hazards for 12 of the holes. Shortly before Cochran’s death in 1985, he proclaimed the project his ultimate masterpiece, attributing its success to having ‘set out to preserve the natural terrain as God gave it to us’.
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