Here you can learn all about The Canyons at Dellwood Park in Lockport, Illinois. Not too far from Chicago, this course is free to play but constantly tended to by its creator, who runs a disc golf pro shop in the park. That means Canyons is kept in great condition as players flock to it for its many fun layouts and uncommonly drastic elevation changes for the region.
The Canyons at Dellwood Park is ranked #19 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 The Canyons at Dellwood Park 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 The Canyons at Dellwood Park
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
The Canyons at Dellwood Park: Basic Info
- When did The Canyons at Dellwood Park open?
2014 - How many times has The Canyons at Dellwood Park 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 The Canyons at Dellwood Park?
Sean Callahan - Is The Canyons at Dellwood Park free or pay-to-play?
Free - When is The Canyons at Dellwood Park available for public play?
Year-round
History of the Canyons at Dellwood Park Disc Golf Course
By the spring of 2013, Lockport, Illinois, resident Sean Callahan had been totally consumed by disc golf for four years.
"In those first years, I wanted to find as many disc golf courses as possible," Callahan said. "I was going up to Wisconsin, over to Indiana – anywhere that had disc golf baskets, me and my buddies were gonna go. Every disc golfer knows the feeling; we were just absolutely obsessed."
Something else any obsessed disc golfer will know about is the automatic compulsion to assess any outdoor area's potential for becoming a good course. And when Callahan looked at the elevation changes (unusual in much of Illinois), stream, fields, and woods of Lockport's own Dellwood Park, he thought the potential was off the charts. So he sent an e-mail to the district overseeing the park letting them know about the raw disc golf gem under their noses and his idea to cut and polish it to perfection.
"I immediately got an e-mail back from the parks director asking to meet the next morning," Callahan recalled. "I was like, 'Whoa! Okay.' I thought I would need to send 10 e-mails before I got listened to."
When they met the next day, Callahan found out the quick response was largely due to how the city's officials had already heard of disc golf at trade fairs and had previously considered installing a course. However, they hadn't known where to begin with design and construction, so they had never followed through on the idea. It turned out Callahan's offer to design a course and lead the installation was the only push needed to get the ball rolling on a disc golf course project in Lockport.
From there, it was a matter of creating a design that the city liked, having the city formally approve funds for the course, and putting in the work to build tees, install baskets, and do the trimming and clearing needed to create clean fairways and greens. After all that, the Canyons at Dellwood Park's original 18 holes premiered in September 2014, about one and a half years after Callahan's e-mailed proposal. The city had paid the costs of physical materials while Callahan and a small group of disc golfers had put in the labor for free.
But Callahan wasn't done with the Canyons yet. He almost immediately began looking for other ways to improve and diversify the course. And the work he was doing paid off when the course became, in Callahan's words, "crazy popular" in just its first year of existence.
Then, as if things weren't going well enough, the disc golfers made a chance discovery that forested areas near the park were, unbeknownst to park officials, actually park property. A little lobbying secured funds to expand the course into this area, and a whole new dimension was added to the Canyons with nine secluded holes away from the park's usual hustle and bustle.
Of course, all this time for course work wasn't just magically appearing in Callahan's schedule. He was making plenty of sacrifices to assure the success of the course. However, he had an idea that might change that.
"I got to a point where I was balancing my personal life and professional life, and then after both of those putting in all this time into disc golf," Callahan recalled. "I thought about how great it could be to put 100% of my professional time into disc golf. And I went to the park district and asked about opening up a pro shop. The were like, 'Ha ha, you're crazy.' But I told them I was serious."
Callahan's vision was a symbiotic relationship between the pro shop and course. Running the shop would allow him to be there throughout the day to help introduce the park's many visitors to disc golf and the course while also being a resource to immediately equip people eager to play their first rounds. As the number of players in the area grew, so would the shop's business. Additionally, he would always be on the course to take care of maintenance issues or plan course improvement efforts.
In the end, Callahan got the go-ahead to start the shop, and it has definitely paid dividends. Incredibly, Callahan said that since 2017 he has raised $10,000-$15,000 per year from the sale of used discs at the pro shop which he has always put back into course enhancement projects.
How Hard Is the Canyons at Dellwood Park?
The Canyons at Dellwood Park has a huge number of available layouts that even differ in the number of holes they use. To give you a taste, here's how its easiest 18-hole layout and most difficult 27-hole layout stack up in terms of average distance, difficulty, and more:
| Layout Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating* | Scoring Average* |
| OG 18 Red Tee A - Pins | Short | Technical | Moderate | 179 | +3 |
| Efficient 27 White Tees - B Pins | Long | Technical | Challenging | 190 | +11 |
*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 many, many other layouts at this track, check out The Canyons at Dellwood Park's UDisc Courses page.
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 Disc Golf at Canyons?
The biggest thing to know about what to expect when playing The Canyons at Dellwood Park is pretty obvious from the name.
"Most people that aren't from Illinois think that it's just super flat and corn fields, but in Dellwood Park, there's a ton of elevation from waterways that used to be in the park," said Callahan. "I think that's what people like about it the most."
And of course, the elevation aspect is part of what attracted Callahan to the property to begin with. However, when he created the design for the course, his guiding principal was far from "make as many fun downhill shots as possible."
"My aim is not to make the course fun; it's to make it good," Callahan said. "I tried to work with the idea I would make a pro player feel challenged and an amateur player want to get better."
Meeting that goal usually means requiring players to be good at a diversity of shots, so it's not surprising that variety defines the Canyons nearly as much as elevation does.
The course has longer and shorter holes, often with pins placed near hazards like drop-offs or water that are prepared to make players pay for errant drives or upshots. There is also a stream flowing through the property that adds both plenty of scenic moments and numerous chances to go out-of-bounds. For huge arms, there are places to really air shots out and get eagle looks on relatively short par 4s. For those whose talent is finesse, there are plenty of tightly wooded holes to test their skills.
Essentially, the course is a hybrid of many types of disc golf: flatter park-style holes, secluded woods holes, and holes demanding control of very up- and downhill shots. This is likely a reason the course is so highly regarded by those who play it. No matter what type of disc golf you like best, there's a good chance you'll find it at the Canyons. Throw into that Callahan and the park staff's constant maintenance, and you've got a world-class disc golf experience.
Three Real Five Star Reviews of The Canyons at Dellwood Park
Three real reviews of The Canyons at Dellwood Park from disc golfers on UDisc:
Note that the publication date of this post reflects the last time we made minor updates to it. Some information has not changed since a major update in 2021.
