When you're dreaming of creating a great disc golf course, one of the hardest tasks is finding a place to put it. Unless you're lucky enough to have a generous private landowner nearby, public property owned by your city, county, municipality, or other local authority will likely be your best bet.
Checking out parks for little-used spaces is the obvious first step, but they're also where you're likeliest to encounter competition and pushback from other groups and interests. Where do you look if all that becomes too much?
Some hopeful course creators have discovered an option: The properties other people don't want or would rather forget. Places like former dumps and derelict quarries fit the bill, and we talked to a few course builders who've used disc golf to revive such sites.
The Desert Dump Turned Disc Golf Course
Chandler, Arizona, is a bustling suburb of Phoenix in the Sonoran desert, and its disc golf course, Paseo Vista, has livened up a bit of land that was unused and untended for years before it arrived.
"The city was pulling out a course that was in a small area and seeing too much use," said course designer and Professional Disc Golf Association Hall of Famer Dan Ginnelly. "The homeowners nearby didn't like it. They [the city] mentioned that the old dump was an option for a new place for the course."
Ginnelly knew that there were not going to be a ton of options for locations to install a new course around Chandler and decided to take a tour of the old landfill to see what might be feasible.
"Being in the desert, we're lucky to have any disc golf courses," said Ginnelly. "Back in the 80s you had to go all the way to L.A. to play in a tournament. Out here in the desert it's so hard to get the city to put a course in. Football, soccer, baseball fields – they all take precedent. There's no woods or forests, so it's hard to find a good place for a course."
That didn't stop Ginnelly and other dedicated disc golfers from getting creative and installing Paseo Vista. It attracts hundreds of players each month and has over 2,800 ratings on UDisc, turning a literal wasteland into a hub of healthy recreaton. And it's not just the land that was repurposed at Paseo Vista – one of the signature holes utilizes an old culvert to add an additional obstacle and visual element.
"When we first did the walkthrough, they had old culverts laying around that the city was happy to let us use," said Ginnelly. "There's only one culvert hole, and it's a perfect little dinker hole. It came out to be a good course."
From Trash Heap to Fairways in Maryland
North Glen Park in Glen Burnie, Maryland, is situated on an old farm that was used as a local dumping ground for multiple generations. While the city had converted it into a park and added some walking trails, they had no plans to make use of the wooded section that Jeff Schwabline sought approval to put a disc golf course on.
"In 2020 it was just a small community park," said Schwabline. "The park used to be a family farm, and they used a wooded area as a dumping ground where there was just tons and tons and tons of broken glass. We revitalized what really was a dangerous place to be. If you went in with a pet or kid, someone was probably gonna be injured."
Schwabline and volunteers have removed an estimated 20 to 30 dumpsters worth of trash from the course, but there is still work to be done. He encourages players to volunteer their time to continue to make the course safer and more enjoyable for everyone.
"One of the biggest things people should take away from the course is that if you play a course and see that people are working on it, ask if you can help before you just write a bad review on UDisc," said Schwabline. "The amount of work four people can get done instead of one is significant. It really makes a huge difference. Especially with things like invasive species and garbage removal."
Those involved with the course have made an effort to celebrate the fact that it used to be filled with glass and debris and is now a safe place for recreation. Their biggest tournament of the year has a name that plays on the long-running, popular Kansas disc golf event formerly known as the Glass Blown Open (now the Dynamic Discs Open).
"Our major yearly tournament is the Glass Broken Open," said Duncan Yeager, who was the lead designer of the course. "Trophies are filled with broken chipped glass from the course. It celebrates rather than bemoans the fact that it used to be a dump."
Along with motivating a group to remove glass and other garbage from the woods, the course has helped curtail unwanted activities in the park. This is especially appreciated by local officials as the course is located right next to an elementary school.
"One of the aspects that parks love about disc golf is the people presence," said Yeager. "Whenever you put people in a park doing legitimate things, illegitimate things go away. The county has relied on disc golf to help clean up and legitimize areas of our parks."
Chiseling a Solid Disc Golf Course Out of a Quarry
In LaSalle, Illinois, you can find the highly-rated Quarry at Rotary Park disc golf course built on the site of an old limestone quarry. Its story shows that with creativity, collaboration, and determination, disc golfers and their community leaders can overcome the challenges some abandoned properties pose to create safe, fun courses everyone can enjoy.
A local quarry was exhausted and abandoned around the late 1970s and the site was eventually donated to the city of LaSalle. This started a long, slow process of letting the quarry return to nature and adding recreational elements such as a playground, walking trails, and ball fields. The idea of adding a disc golf course to the park was slow to crystallize but well worth the wait.
"It took fifteen years from when the idea began to when the course was finished," said Dan Nagle, who co-designed the course with Dana Vicich and Wes Black.
Nagle explained that it was the "preliminary stuff" – e.g., many meetings about safety, funding, etc. – that made progress so modest initially. Once local officials gave the greenlight, the three co-designers needed just "four focused months of work" to get the course in the ground.
Despite what Nagle called "ups and downs and hurdles" that arose during the many hours of talks and meetings, they led to a fortuitous outcome. Whereas the designers had originally envisioned a destination course with extremely challenging holes at pro-level distances, concerns about workload made them go back to the drawing board and plan something more welcoming for disc golfers of all stripes.
"All in all, the course that finally went into the ground was ideal because, with so many new players showing up to throw, presenting them with a reasonable challenge as opposed to the difficulty of a destination type layout just made more sense overall," Nagle said. "All skill levels can now enjoy playing The Quarry. The red tees are good for beginners with the white tees presenting a nice challenge for the more advanced throwers."
Nagle emphasized that though the scope of the course was scaled down, they didn't hold back when it came to quality. And "they" included the city officials invested in the project.
"It was all a challenge," said Nagle. "Digging was hard because you're back to quarry rock after 1 or 2 inches [2.5 or 5 centimeters]. It doesn't have normal topsoil. How do you get concrete tee pads into areas where trucks can't go? The city went above and beyond. If a truck couldn't go there, they'd bring in cement in a bucket. I was amazed they were getting this done. It went from an abandoned quarry to a nice 18 hole disc golf course."
One reason the persistence was worth it is that The Quarry at Rotary Park offers players something very few courses in Illinois can: elevation changes.
"A reward of the course is that it's a unique piece of land," said Nagle. "You won't think you're in Illinois because there's hills everywhere. The hills are from the quarry. It went pretty deep, which helped to create some fun elevation change you wouldn't naturally find in Illinois. There are two holes that throw over water. Those ponds are also from the quarrying process."
With minimal trees and natural obstacles to build the course around, Nagle and his team got creative to design a course that is not only fun to play and beautiful to look at but also alludes to the site's history as a limestone quarry.
"It's kind of a weird landscape because there's maybe a few hundred trees on the entire course, and they're all poplar trees," said Nagle. "Poplar trees and wild western cedar bushes are the main features of the course. We used quarry rocks throughout the property to make natural benches, add some visual elements, and help keep the quarry theme going."
Their creativity and vision allowed them to take advantage of a piece of land suited to few other forms of recreation. Additionally, the pace of disc golf and its common use of signage made it feel natural to include informative elements that give players a deeper sense of place.
"The course is sprinkled with signs that educate visitors on what it used to be," Nagle said. "About 200 people a month use it on UDisc. I'm tickled to see people from so many different states playing the course."
Even When Sites Aren't So Abandoned, Disc Golf Can Coexist
LaSalle isn't the only place where a former quarry has been given new life as a great disc golf course. Quarries Disc Golf in Vermont also took advantage of the unique landscape an old quarry left behind to create a beautiful, peaceful playing experience in an unexpected environment.
The land, which is comprised of around 70 abandoned granite quarries, was sold by Rock of Ages (current owner of the world's largest deep-hole granite quarry in operation) to the town of Barre. A local man led a multi-year effort to conserve the land. The eventual easement included recreation as one of the key purposes of the property. Now known as the Barre Town Forest, this multi-use recreation area provides opportunities for cross country skiing, fishing, hiking, hunting, snowshoeing, mountain biking, snowmobiling, bird watching, and disc golf.
"Coexistence is a huge model that we were focused on," said David Rouleau, who spearheaded the effort to get a disc golf course on the property. "When I pitched the layout, I knew where everything was and proposed the course around those trails. I walked the property with the biking community to discuss our options for the course. We worked with them to understand what would be safe for the bikers."
By thoughtfully designing the course with existing users and trails in mind, Rouleau and course designer Al Rosa were not only able to appease other recreationalists but also reduce the time and effort it took to install the course and create a smaller impact on the town forest.
"To minimize cutting trees we tried to use snowmobile trails as much as possible, which minimized work and helped reduce tree removal," said Rouleau. "We did a first cut, second cut, third cut, and fourth cut. We got the course in, played it, decided what's too tight, and what are the line options. As part of designing the course we walked it with the forester and town manager to find out which trees have value and which trees don't. We got a lot of guidance on what to take out."
Rouleau also took ample time to speak with neighbors and stakeholders to educate them about the project, hear their concerns, and assure them that the disc golf community would be good neighbors and stewards of the land.
"One challenge was that the people I needed approval from had no idea what a disc golf course was," said Rouleau. "Neighbors were worried about who it would bring. I really tried to be friendly and extra kind to the neighbors and think the way they think. That's what it's all about: Work with the other users, listen to them, hear their concerns, and address them. A lot of it became educating people on how to coexist."
By being respectful of other users and designing courses that keep everyone in multi-use areas safe, the disc golf community opens ups options for where new courses can go and helps set an example for other recreational communities. The more groups that can successfully enjoy the same piece of property, the more opportunities there are for funding and maintenance, and the more individuals there are who will care about conserving and maintaining that environment.
"Other communities are trying to conserve land, and they love the model that we have here," said Rouleau. "We've been featured at various town forest summits and recreation conferences. How have we had so much success with this coexistence of bikers, snowmobilers, walkers, and cross-country skiers all using the same real estate and making it work? The key to that is education. Yield to and be respectful of other people. Educate people about other parts of the quarry. We make people aware of what they're walking into and what else is there with little maps and forest walking guides."
Building a course in a multi-use repurposed area does not mean that quality must be sacrificed. Quarries Disc Golf is ranked in the top five courses in Vermont, a state that's home to Smuggler's Notch Disc Golf Center, which has two of the world's top ten disc golf courses that are home to a regular Disc Golf Pro Tour stop and have hosted the PDGA World Disc Golf Championships multiple times.
"We get pros coming in on their way to Smuggler's Notch that applaud the course," said Rouleau.
Give a Property Near You a New Start with Disc Golf
Should you discover your own diamond of a property hiding in the rough, we want to to help you use disc golf to make it shine. You can find plenty of tips and resources for course building in our guide "How To Get A Disc Golf Course In Your Area" as well as in other posts on this blog. Need stats to help build your case? You're likely to find them in our annual Disc Golf Growth Report or Disc Golf Health Index.
Still not finding what you need? Reach out to us at [email protected] to tell us what you're looking for.
