Day 935.
If only all days could be this pleasant. Today we drove to play Pike Lake and Paint Creek with Ryan Dalton and his girlfriend Thya Butcher. Those courses are about an hour-and-a-half drive away for us, so we hadn't made it out there yet.
The weather was a chilly 32 degrees to start, but that worked out fine since climbing the hills at Pike kept us plenty warm. Some of the holes were a bit longer than I expected so we (we each played doubles) were playing for par (3) fairly often. There was a lot of elevation change on the course and the signature hole -- Hole 12 -- was a really cool downhill throw . . . and it was just fun to watch everyone's throws glide down the hill. Pike Lake is an entirely wooded course (which suits us just fine).
From Pike we headed over to Paint Creek (about a half-hour away). It has more open holes to start (and one to end) but the middle section of the course is amazingly wooded. There are two or three "plinko" holes where I don't even know if a pro could honestly pick out a line through them . . . and all of the holes are very challenging. A lot of them have open fairways/lines, but they are open to reach a putting zone, not to reach the hole itself.
We immensely enjoyed both courses and would play them frequently if they weren't so far away. I could still see getting out there once a year to play them. But I'm glad we did them before any leaves opened up because I think a lot of the fun of playing them would be gone with trying to find discs out there in the summertime. This time of year we had no problem locating discs.
Today Danny surprised me. I've always thought he was just kind of good (which you'd expect since he plays so much) but today I saw him playing at a different level at times. Now, he still makes plenty of bad shots (don't we all, especially at courses like this) but I couldn't believe how often he was throwing drives on disc golf lines through the woods and going exactly where he wanted. I saw a bunch of 200'+ throws on these low, hard disc golf lines. So I was already impressed when we got to Hole 17 at Paint . . . 313' foot dogleg right. I tried a forehand drive but hit a tree -- we still used my tee shot which was probably 125' short because his drive faded farther left. For me, it was an obvious Firebird forehand type shot with a skip around the corner (on this hard right dogleg). He sees the basket through an effectively 5' gap in the trees about 50' away from us (and another 75' to the hole) . . . Ryan jokes about how he should throw it on the direct line (what fool would do that?) . . . so Danny pulls out a Truth and threads the needle to within 10' of the basket. I threw the Firebird around the corner to 20' because I knew I had zero chance of making that shot . . . the same one he just walked up and made like it was no big deal. He's still got a lot to learn and improve on but that shot blew my mind. Given the courses we played on today he missed a lot of trees . . . playing so much at Osage is paying big dividends for him.
Overall a great day, we had a ton of fun throwing with Ryan and Thya (was a fun casual dubs round for all of us) and the courses were top notch.
If only all days could be this pleasant. Today we drove to play Pike Lake and Paint Creek with Ryan Dalton and his girlfriend Thya Butcher. Those courses are about an hour-and-a-half drive away for us, so we hadn't made it out there yet.
The weather was a chilly 32 degrees to start, but that worked out fine since climbing the hills at Pike kept us plenty warm. Some of the holes were a bit longer than I expected so we (we each played doubles) were playing for par (3) fairly often. There was a lot of elevation change on the course and the signature hole -- Hole 12 -- was a really cool downhill throw . . . and it was just fun to watch everyone's throws glide down the hill. Pike Lake is an entirely wooded course (which suits us just fine).
From Pike we headed over to Paint Creek (about a half-hour away). It has more open holes to start (and one to end) but the middle section of the course is amazingly wooded. There are two or three "plinko" holes where I don't even know if a pro could honestly pick out a line through them . . . and all of the holes are very challenging. A lot of them have open fairways/lines, but they are open to reach a putting zone, not to reach the hole itself.
We immensely enjoyed both courses and would play them frequently if they weren't so far away. I could still see getting out there once a year to play them. But I'm glad we did them before any leaves opened up because I think a lot of the fun of playing them would be gone with trying to find discs out there in the summertime. This time of year we had no problem locating discs.
Today Danny surprised me. I've always thought he was just kind of good (which you'd expect since he plays so much) but today I saw him playing at a different level at times. Now, he still makes plenty of bad shots (don't we all, especially at courses like this) but I couldn't believe how often he was throwing drives on disc golf lines through the woods and going exactly where he wanted. I saw a bunch of 200'+ throws on these low, hard disc golf lines. So I was already impressed when we got to Hole 17 at Paint . . . 313' foot dogleg right. I tried a forehand drive but hit a tree -- we still used my tee shot which was probably 125' short because his drive faded farther left. For me, it was an obvious Firebird forehand type shot with a skip around the corner (on this hard right dogleg). He sees the basket through an effectively 5' gap in the trees about 50' away from us (and another 75' to the hole) . . . Ryan jokes about how he should throw it on the direct line (what fool would do that?) . . . so Danny pulls out a Truth and threads the needle to within 10' of the basket. I threw the Firebird around the corner to 20' because I knew I had zero chance of making that shot . . . the same one he just walked up and made like it was no big deal. He's still got a lot to learn and improve on but that shot blew my mind. Given the courses we played on today he missed a lot of trees . . . playing so much at Osage is paying big dividends for him.
Overall a great day, we had a ton of fun throwing with Ryan and Thya (was a fun casual dubs round for all of us) and the courses were top notch.
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