Before it was a gated golf club, Frost Creek was envisioned as a ski resort rivaling Vail and Beaver Creek. As General Manager Mike Gibbs tells the story, in the 1970s Fred Kummer, a St. Louis developer, started buying up large tracts of land along Brush Creek Road south of Eagle with the intention of building a ski area and village on Adam Mountain (dubbed Adam’s Rib Resort) and three golf courses with at least 800 homes. When the county balked at a ski resort (to the cheers of community activists who opposed the project), Kummer downsized his vision for Adam’s Rib, building an 18-hole championship golf course (designed by Tom Weiskopf) with a 40,000-square-foot clubhouse with a restaurant, spa, pool and fitness center, and five members-only cabins on 1,100 acres, platting 97 five-plus-acre lots for outsize luxury homes. By 2015, when only five spec homes had been built (and four unsold), Kummer sold the property to a Denver-based capital investment firm. Replatting the club with smaller sites for 137 more modestly sized (and priced) homes, they rechristened it Frost Creek, for the burbling stream that meanders through the development.

“We’ve been busy every year since 2015, with people interested in the community and coming to take a look at membership, but the difference this year over the past five years was the conversion rate: people came up this year with their minds made up and check in hand,” says Gibbs, who notes that buyers started arriving on June 1, when the pandemic travel ban was lifted. “People started coming out of the woodwork, looking for sanctuary, and we became very attractive to the Front Range Crowd.... We used to think we had a lot of real estate left to sell, but by the end of this year, we’ll only have a handful of lots and homesites.”

Case in point: Hunter’s View, a development of 44 custom homes on small lots, from 2,300 to 2,950 square feet, priced from $1 million to $1.5 million. At press time, all but one of the first 15 homes under construction had been presold or were under contract; the club plans to release another 29 homes this spring.

Who is buying at Frost Creek? Couples with young children seeking a break not just from city life, but also from peripatetic resort living.

“Many of our guests are coming from busy areas, so our resorts aren’t that much of a break,” Gibbs adds. “But when they come out here, it’s just so silent you almost feel like you have 1,100 acres to yourself. Even last winter, members would say we had a great time skiing, but we’d rather spend the day just snowshoeing around Frost Creek.”

Number of active listings on the market, at press time: 2

Median home price of active listings: $1.48M

Number of existing homes sold in 2020: 0

New Construction sales Pending: 14