Here you can learn all about Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf in Bonshaw, Prince Edward Island, Canada. A creation of renowned course designer John Houck, it has hosted Canada's national disc golf championships multiple times and is known as a scenic, top-notch destination in Canada's Maritimes.
Hillcrest Farm is ranked #25 in the most recent World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 released annually by us here at UDisc. The rankings are based on millions of player ratings of over 16,000 disc golf courses worldwide on UDisc Courses, which is the most complete and regularly updated disc golf course directory in existence.
Read the whole post to get a full overview of Hillcrest Farm or jump to a section that interests you most in the navigation below.
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- Basics: Times in top 100, year established, designers, cost to play, & availability
- History of Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf: Basic Info
- When did Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf open?
2011 - How many times has Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf made the annual World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 since the rankings were first released in 2020?
Year 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 Top 100? - Who designed Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf?
John Houck - Is Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf free or pay-to-play?
Pay-to-play. See its UDisc Courses entry for pricing. - When is Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf available for public play?
Seasonal, spring through fall. Opening dates are flexible and weather-dependent.
History of Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf
The story of Hillcrest Farm is an idiosyncratic one. In some ways, it resembles that of Ray Jordan and Blue Ribbon Pines (another stalwart in the World's Best Disc Golf Courses) where a person with abundant land and very little knowledge of disc golf decided that building a course would be a worthwhile project. But, at the risk of getting a little abstract, if you made disc golf into a person, it's clear that Jordan's passion for the sport has grown so much that he would now give that person a bear hug. On the other hand, Bill Best, owner of Hillcrest Farm, gives off the vibe that Disc Golf Personified would more likely get just a friendly handshake from him.
However, it's not the fact that someone with a mild interest in disc golf owns a disc golf course that makes Hillcrest's story truly unlikely; it's the fact that a person with a mild interest in disc golf has been so willing to put a huge amount of resources and time into creating a course that's in the upper echelons of quality at very little personal benefit to himself. And that unusual mixture has been part of Hillcrest's story from the start.
The first time Best played disc golf, he was visiting his son in British Columbia. His son was a passionate disc golfer, and Best wanted to try it out.
"The course we went to, I think it was a nice course, but there was hardly any signage around, so you didn't really know where the basket was," Best said. "I think there was a herd of goats to keep the grass down and we got chased by a couple of dogs. And when we sat down at the end of the day, my son asked me what I thought. I said, 'Oh, it's not a bad sport – there was some family time outside with a bit of challenge to it. But, I'm sure we could build something a little better than that at our place in Prince Edward Island.' And that's what it all resulted from."
Best, a veterinarian who owns on a 135-acre/55-hectare farm, had about 50 acres/20 hectares of land on his property that was rarely used. That's where he planned to put the course. At first, he thought he would design it himself, figuring it couldn't be but so hard.
"I thought, 'Okay, here'd be the first hole in a nice place that kind of drops down. And the second one could maybe go here...,' and by the third one I was smart enough to realize I didn't have a clue what I was doing, that this was going to be a disaster," Best recalled.
That realization made Best turn to his computer. There he searched around for disc golf course designers and sent off a few e-mails to the people he found.
Not long afterward, he got an e-mail back from someone he'd contacted: John Houck. Houck happens to be one of the most prominent disc golf course designers of all time, but that wasn't something Best was really aware of. And originally Best turned down Houck's offer because he thought it was too high, but further negotiations eventually ended in them finding a compromise.
In amazingly quick succession, Best's whim to create a place to play a sport he found "not bad" on some unused land on his farm had turned into him funding the creation of a world-class course by a world-class designer. It's like if someone who thought it'd be kind of neat to have a little street art on the front of their store ended up hiring Banksy to do the job.
Over four trips to the island, Houck designed the layout and oversaw course creation. The Best family – consisting of parents Bill and Mary and their children – and friends of the family all pitched in to do work like installing concrete tee pads, putting in baskets, and building benches and bridges.
When all was said and done, the figure Best had had in mind when he first budgeted for building a course was left far behind, and he ended up spending about three times that amount. For that money, though, he got a course that would electrify the small disc golf community of the Maritimes, the collective name for the eastern Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island.
"There was no player base on Prince Edward Island at the time he built the course," said Ben Smith, a course designer and active member of the disc golf community in the Maritimes. "The guy goes out and paints a Picasso without knowing if anyone will ever see it. But having this five-star course has catapulted our region of the world into the ability to do things we would never have been able to do."
The biggest of those accomplishments is hosting the Canadian Championships multiple years. Those competitions drew some of the best-known pros in the sport, including Paul McBeth, Nate Sexton, Simon Lizotte, Paige Pierce, James Conrad, and Kristin Tattar. The star power of those players helped footage of the events filmed by Central Coast Disc Golf get very respectable view counts, which in turn boosted the course's notoriety beyond just eastern Canada and the northeastern United States.
And while Best may not regularly follow or play disc golf, he said he was "ecstatic" that the some of the sport's best players played and loved his course. He's also been extremely surprised by and satisfied with the traffic and reactions the course has garnered from everyday players.
"It cost a lot more than I originally budgeted," Best said. "But now I have people from all over North America and elsewhere coming, and they're all happy and say it's a nice course. And it's no question now that John Houck was a good investment...I'm so busy that I get to play maybe one or two games a year, but I'm amazed – amazed on a regular basis – at how many people come play the course."
Putting aside the seemingly scant motivation to build a course in the first place, these comments show how Best's decision to invest in making Hillcrest Farm as good as possible is a completely practical one. The better the course, the more word about it will spread, and the more people will come play it and help recoup the expense of its creation (this logic was, in fact, part of Houck's pitch).
But it's undeniable that as little as Best appears to take notice of developments in the greater disc golf world, he's proud of his course's standing within it. So when he hears about ways to improve Hillcrest, he's quick to enact them, and he often thinks them up himself just from listening to visitors.
"My husband...is the visionary about where the course should go in the future," said Best's wife, Mary. "He’s always thinking about ways to improve the course and make the experience not just good for players, but great. Usually this involves more work for us! But Bill is typically in the forefront of that, too, since he drives the tractors, runs the chainsaws, fixes the benches, [and] plants the trees."
This constant desire to be, so to say, the "best" has clearly impressed the vast majority of people who've visited Hillcrest Farm and has paid off in it becoming the one of the best courses in Canada and one of the top places to play disc golf in the world.
How Hard Is Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf?
Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf has multiple layouts. However, only one of those had been converted to a Smart Layout when we last updated this post, so it was the only one eligible for the ratings below:
| Layout Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating* | Scoring Average* |
| Short Tees | Long | Highly Technical | Very Challenging | 176 | +2 |
*Scoring average and par rating constantly adjust as more people score rounds with UDisc. These numbers reflect stats from the time of publication and may have changed slightly since then.
To see other available layouts, visit Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf's page in the UDisc Courses directory.
To learn more about what the categories for distance, technicality, overall difficulty, and par rating mean, check out these posts:
What's It Like to Play at Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf?
If you think woods disc golf is the best disc golf, Hillcrest Farm is the place for you. The fairways are often tight and landing off of them usually puts you in positions where you'll have to navigate a huge number of skinny trunks to find a good position again. That said, there is always a fair way (yes, two words) to get to the basket offered on every hole. The gaps aren't so small that they are arbitrary or impossible, and there's something magical about how the grassy fairways wind through the course's dense woods.
Though you can take on a Gold layout that features fairly long distances meant to challenge elite players, the dense woods lining the majority of fairways give the average player plenty to deal with if they opt for one of the shorter layouts. Take a look at this fairly short par 4 played in 2019 before a Gold Layout existed to see what we mean. Despite techincally requiring two throws with just 270 feet/83 meters of power behind them to reach the basket with a birdie look, it's anything but a gimme even for experienced disc golfers.
As is typical of most layouts at Hillcrest, it's the twists and turns of a tree-lined fairway, not distance, that create challenge. You'll also notice the elevation changes throughout the hole, which is something else many of Hillcrest Farm's fairways have in common.
Three Real Five Star Reviews of Hillcrest Farm Disc Golf
Three real reviews of Hillcrest from disc golfers on UDisc:
Note that the publication date of this post reflects the last time we updated it. Some information has not changed since a major update in 2022.
