Dan's Vermont Sprint and disc golf origin story

This past week, I went on a 30-hour trip to Vermont to play disc golf. It was a wonderful time. I wanted to share a brief recap, and also a bit more about disc golf in general and how it became such a big part of my life.

After working on Monday (June 2), I packed a few things into my car and started the 4-hour drive to Stowe, Vermont. Dinner is usually an afterthought for me on my solo trips, and this time was no different. I did some quick Googling when stopping for gas along the route and found an award-winning mac and cheese restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire. "Mr. Mac's" serves several types of mac and cheese bakes, plus salads and other items.

The second half of the drive was very rural, running through the interior New England mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont. Just after dark, I made it to my hotel room in Stowe. It was a small studio with a Murphy bed - plenty of space for just me for one night.

The next morning, it was time for the main event - two courses at Smugglers Notch Resort. These courses play host to the Disc Golf Pro Tour each year, so I knew they were going to be good. They definitely lived up to the hype! The courses offered a wide range of challenges, all of the amenities that disc golfers could ask for, and stunning views of the Green Mountains. I was very glad that I had taken the day off in order to come play them (they are closed each weekend this June for various events). It was worth the drive 100%.

After experiencing both courses at Smugglers Notch, buying a souvenir disc in the pro shop, and eating some leftover mac and cheese, it was about 2:00 and time for me to decide what to do next. I considered playing one or both courses again, but concluded that I was happy with my experience there. I had thrown both courses well and did not want to mar those feelings by playing again on a harder layout that I would likely do poorly on, or an easier layout that might feel too simple. I decided instead to go check out another course a 30min drive away that I had only discovered the previous evening in the hotel room. This third course is called Cold Hollow, and is on someone's private farm. It is a newer course (having only been created in 2020) so it has less of a reputation.

I fell in love with Cold Hollow immediately. It has a blend of many of the best features at the Smugglers Notch courses (great course design, great views, good amenities, etc.), and a few other unique challenges thrown in. The first hole starts by throwing from inside the owner's barn! On a day where Smugglers Notch had already lived up to my high expectations, Cold Hollow somehow came out of left field and stole the show. Smugglers Notch was amazing, but I expected that. Cold Hollow was amazing and I did not expect it, which gave it that extra magical feeling. I ended up giving both Cold Hollow and one of the courses at Smugglers Notch a 5.0 rating, which is the highest possible and only the fourth and fifth 5.0s that I have given out of 329 courses played to date (the other course at Smugglers Notch got a 4.5 rating, which is still phenomenal).

After finishing up at Cold Hollow (and buying a souvenir T-shirt), it was time to start making my way back to Portland. I took a bit of a scenic detour, traveling along the remote Vermont Route 105 near the Canadian border and passing by Lake Willoughby - a glacially carved lake that almost reminded me of a fjord.

In New Hamphshire, I took a different route than the previous day and happened upon the Mount Washington Resort - with the mountain itself in the background. Later, I drove through Crawford Notch State Park - where the road passed between the craggiest mountains I have seen on this side of the Mississippi.

I finally arrived back in Portland around 10 PM. Here's the overall route that I drove on my little trip - a nice 500-mile loop:

How on earth did I get to this point with disc golf? I sort of feel like I fell into it - but similar to what I said about this year's adventure, I suppose it all makes sense when I reflect back on it. While growing up, I played quite a bit of "Frisbee golf" with family and friends (note that "Frisbee golf" is not the same as "disc golf" - disc golf uses specific discs for the purpose). My friends and I would head over to the local school playground on the weekends and make up the holes as we went - "First you have to throw it through the monkey bars, then you have to score in the soccer net! Par five." My extended family did something similar at our annual camping weekend.

I think my first experience actually disc golfing was with some friends in high school at a course called Hickory Hills in Traverse City, Michigan. That course (which still exists, although it has been redesigned) definitely made an impact on me. It plays on a ski hill and has some great throws, as well as views of downtown Traverse City and the Grand Traverse Bay in the distance. I think my first disc was probably something that I found on that course (if you find a disc and there is no phone number written on it, it's yours if you want it). In college at Grand Valley, I played a course with friends several times that routed around one of the off-campus apartment complexes. It was objectively a terrible course - but a fun thing to do in college. After college I sort of dabbled with the sport for years, playing a few rounds a year with friends but never doing much beyond that.

What changed? In a word, COVID-19. In the spring of 2020 I had recently decided to stop playing Pokemon GO, and was looking for a new thing to do outdoors that was socially distanced. Disc golf checked all of those boxes, and I already had a couple of discs to use. I started going out to play by myself regularly, and got hooked quickly. Some of the most important things that I like about playing disc golf, and specifically the way I do it where I explore different courses instead of going back to the same course again and again, are:

• It's a great way to get outside and get a little bit of exercise. A simple 9-hole course can be a literal easy stroll in the park, but most highly regarded courses have a full 18 holes (or more) and are more like a 1-3 mile hike on hilly, wilder terrain.
• It's a great way to explore new places, even in an area you might think you're pretty familiar with. Playing disc golf got me off of the main freeways running through the Grand Rapids area, and seeing new towns and neighborhoods that are off the beaten path.
• Compared to the golf you're thinking of (which I call "ball golf" now), disc golf is much better for the environment. While ball golf calls to mind clear cutting trees to create heavily manicured open fairways, a typical disc golf fairway is much tighter and wilder. It can even just be dirt.
• Each course is a new challenge and takes the focus off of how well I am playing. I am someone that tends to hyper fixate on self-improvement, so if I were to play the same course again and again I know I'd be focused on throwing further and setting new personal bests - which could sour my overall enjoyment of the sport. Playing different courses all the time has the great side effect that I do improve slowly, while also taking the focus away from that improvement. Compared to others who have played as much as I have, I'm still not really very GOOD at disc golf - but doing it in this way has ensured that I keep enjoying it.

The other aspect of my disc golfing is reviewing the courses I play. I knew of the site Disc Golf Course Review from friends, and created an account there when I started playing in 2020 in order to make it easier to find courses and track which ones I had played. Within weeks, I decided to start contributing to the site as a reviewer. I initially focused on reviewing only courses that did not have recent reviews, but by 2021 that had evolved to reviewing every course I play. The reviews give me a chance to be a long-winded writer (which is one of the things I do best) but they also serve as a kind of trip log to chronicle my experiences at each course. Plus the DGCR community loves them! I quickly came to understand that DGCR is kind of a niche site, even within the disc golfing world. When compared to the more mainstream disc golf site UDisc, DGCR is full of people like me who are detail oriented, wanting to plan ahead, and willing to travel to play the best courses.

The rest, as they say, is history. I have now played (as of this writing) 329 different courses in 26 US states and Iceland. My scorebook says that I have logged 607 rounds, meaning that on average I have played the 329 courses less than twice each. That 607 number is also hugely inflated by 25-35 rounds each at a couple of the local courses around Grand Rapids that were accessible enough for me to play in the winter, when I didn't want to drive too far. I'm now considered a Gold level "trusted reviewer" on DGCR, which is the 2nd highest accolade achievable on the site. At this point I'm thinking that I might as well keep playing - maybe one day I'll play in all 50 states and achieve the highest Diamond level "trusted reviewer" status! If you would like to read some of my detailed disc golf course reviews (including those of the courses I just played in Vermont), you can do so by following the link in the left sidebar.

We have the rest of the month here in Portland, and we're going to try to slow down a little bit and enjoy it (we're looking forward to hosting our families here on back-to-back weekends!). We also just booked our next big leg of the trip yesterday - after a few weeks back in Michigan in July, we'll be heading out west to Denver, Colorado for August and the first half of September!

Until next time,

Dan