People think of Colorado and see mountains. Drive the other way, east onto the high plains, and the state changes its mind. Some forty-odd miles out from Denver, near Keenesburg, the grassland gives way to sand, and the sand rises into towering dunes, barren and rugged, pockets of wild ground in the middle of the plains. This is where Rodeo Dunes lies, on roughly 4,000 acres of land that seems to reach back past the American West toward the origins of the game in Scotland and Ireland. The place was found on a screen. Michael Keiser wanted sandy land for a new resort, so he opened Google Earth, moved his mouse east of Denver, and spotted open sandy terrain. Then he went to see it for himself. He jumped a barbed-wire fence and was caught by the rancher who owned the land. What followed was more than seven years of negotiation and development, and at the end of it a golf course on ground that had been a rancher's range. Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw are known for restraint. Their reputation rests on an elegant minimalism, on holes that seem to lie lightly across the ground. At Sand Valley and at Streamsong Red, their courses rest on top of the sand with a kind of composure. Rodeo Dunes is a different animal. The dunes here are very large and choppy, not unlike the ground at Ballyneal, roughly 120 miles to the east, and the course embraces their ruggedness. Many of its features are cut into the dunes rather than laid across their tops. It still reads as natural and blends into the terrain, but it carries a raw look, the kind often found on Irish links, that gives it an identity apart from the pair's other courses on sand. Some of that wildness was deliberate. Mike Keiser pushed Coore, Crenshaw, and their lead shaper, John Hawker, to keep the randomness and awkward shapes found in the landscape rather than smoothing and balancing the land into something tidy. The result is a course with more adventurous features than one usually finds from Coore and Crenshaw. The sixth green shows this best. Its internal contours are rambunctious, almost unruly, and they were already present in the landscape. The builders let them be. So the course is full of adventure. There are blind shots over the sand, fairways whose contours roll and pitch like a sea in weather, and inventive greens built out of the undulating natural topography. Again and again you play toward what you cannot fully see. From the back tees it measures just shy of 7,000 yards, but at 4,700 feet of elevation the course plays shorter and sportier than the card suggests. That does not make it easy. The approaches still demand precision, and a loose shot into these greens finds out quickly how much the ground has to say. What stays with you is the thrill of discovery, which seems fitting for a place first spotted from a satellite. Out here on the plains, the dunes offer a near-perfect canvas for golf, and the land has room for as many as six public courses. Given what the Keiser family has built elsewhere, few resorts have been more eagerly awaited, and several more courses are on the way. Coore and Crenshaw's course, though, is a stunner in its own right: rugged, a little unruly, and entirely of its ground.