When my wife and I made the decision that we were going to drive out to Colorado to watch our niece play softball, one of the first things I said to her was "if we have room, I am bringing my discs". After not playing much for a while, the past couple of years I have really started put in some more time on the local disc golf courses.
It helps that I am now on a small league that my friend and his son started. I basically have to play the same course at least ten times this summer. I think I still have three more to go to get all my scores in.
Anyway, I figured there were probably some pretty cool disc golf courses out west, so I thought it might be cool to play one or two of them.
That led us to Springvale Park Disc Golf Course it was a relatively short drive from our rental house in the Denver suburb of Thornton. It got pretty decent reviews on the UDisc app and it didn't look like it would be too difficult for @mrsbozz.
When we showed up, it was pretty clear that the sprinklers had just been run because the ground was soaking wet and the grass was quite long.
We simply resigned ourselves to the fact that we were going to have to let our shoes dry out after the round and we started to play. As you can see from the photos, the course is very wide open. This is a stark difference to the many wooded holes that I am used to playing here in Michigan.
The course was also very "short" with all holes being par 3's and many of them not being much more than 200 feet long. In many cases I was able to get within putting distance of the baskets with my first throw. Actually, that's not entirely true. I had read before traveling out to Colorado that the higher altitude can effect the flight of your discs.
Certain discs that you are used to doing one thing in the air, might do something totally different at a mile high. That seemed to be the case here. I was struggling to lock in my drive and that left me needing multiple throws to get in the basket. I ended up paring most of the holes where birdies should have been easily attainable for me.
Another thing I failed to realize was the fact that the front nine holes of the course was separated from the back nine by an almost mile walk from one part of the course to the other. With nine holes behind us, the temperature starting to rise, the higher altitude impacting us a little, and soggy feet, we followed the path under the main road over to the other part of the course.
As much as I complain, and while not entirely practical, it was pretty cool the way they had the park set up. Each smaller park sits within walking distance to a subdivision. People who live in the subdivision can easily access the park via concrete walking paths.
Those parks are then connected to other parks in other subdivisions by more concrete paths. You can easily hop from one park or subdivision to another without ever getting on the road. It's pretty cool.
The path also follows a long a pretty long reservoir that sits between the neighborhoods. Looking at Google Maps, there are at least six parks that are all connected between subdivisions if not more. Like I said, it's pretty cool.
As we got to the back (or south) nine of the course, we noticed that the city of Thornton workers were there doing lawn care on the course. We had to wait for the lawn mower to get out of the way on some of the holes. I wasn't in the mood to have any of my discs run over and destroyed!
The back nine was actually a bit longer than the front nine, but the holes were still pretty wide open. This was actually some of the most green we saw when we were out in Colorado. Everything else was kind of this weird shade of brown. I don't know if that is the norm out there or if they were in a bit of a drought.
Eventually the course took us into some of that brown scrub brush that we got so used to seeing out west. It just seemed so dry and unwelcoming, but despite that fact, it was still teaming with life.
I'll be the first to admit that I struggled a bit on the back nine of the course. These last couple of holes really got to me and I ended up getting five bogies on the back nine. I did get a couple birdies in the greener part of the back nine, but by the end we were both getting hot and tired and we knew we still had to walk all the way back to where we had parked the car.
Around hole 16 or 17 a group of two people behind us had finally caught up with us. I had to run back and grab my sunglasses that had fallen out of my bag and they had picked up. That made me feel rushed and my game kind of fell apart. I'm not making excuses, but there were a lot of factors at play.
I ended up finishing the course with a score of four over par which isn't too bad for my first round on a new course. I'm not going to disclose @mrsbozz score as she is still learning the game. By the time we got back to the parking lot, the lawn crew had finished mowing over there as you can see in the opening photo. We might have had much drier feet if they had started over there.
If I remember correctly, @mrsbozz said we clocked something like six miles during that round of disc golf. We were both drenched with sweat and I hit a local gas station so we could grab a couple of Gatorades to rehydrate and get some electrolytes back in our bodies.
It was shaping up to be a toasty Monday in Denver and we still had the whole day ahead of us! Check back tomorrow to find out what we did next!
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