How disc golf got me back to the outdoors

In September 2014, I found myself heading southbound on I-95. It’s a fourteen-hour trip from Fredericksburg, Virginia, to my childhood home in Pensacola, Florida. My time serving in the Marines was over. I was 34 years old and had just experienced a vicious heart-wrenching breakup with my fiancé.

I decided to leave Virginia altogether, despite the beauty and deep, fascinating history of the area. If you’ve never been to Fredericksburg before, the history there is as rich as Boston, Philadelphia, or D.C.—perhaps more so.

But it was back to the beaches for me. I was old enough to understand it takes two to fight and young enough to resent her all the same. So, like with anything involving a long-term, life-altering relationship that comes to a screeching, crashing halt, I got in my feelings and decided to sulk in my new one-bed, one-bath bachelor pad.

My brother, recognizing my despondency (I was like a turtle in my little hole, refusing to come out or interact with the outside world for months), shot me a text one day, asking if I would like to come out to Blue Angel Park and play this new game called disc golf with him and a few buddies. I reluctantly agreed, thinking a few beers and a stupid frisbee game were worth more than another day of drowning my “woe is me” mood in several hours' worth of PS3 games.

When I got out there, they all met me in the parking lot, handing me a lone disc. It wasn’t like any “frisbee” I had ever seen before. Bright red, thick, smallish, and heavy, it had a blank underside and a bright blue stamp on the top. The stamp was a Valkyrie of Viking lore, highlighted by the elaborate, cursive name just above the winged warrior. Now, I carry a Halo, Justice, Harp, King, Enforcer, Underworld, Boatman, Warden, and more.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was holding a high-speed driver. I had to use this driver, designed to sling 300’ to 450’ across an open fairway, to put and approach with. I was immediately fascinated, as horrendously and embarrassingly terrible at the game as I was. The rules are identical to golf in every aspect, even down to the finer details like Mandos and various penalties.

But there was something else that intrigued me as well. Unlike a traditional golf course, we were buried in the thick of the woods on Navy property, surrounded by ancient oaks, baby pines, great grey curtains of Spanish moss, and gigantic palm trees, sticking out of the ground in great clusters, green-blades fingers reaching to the sky.

There were squirrels everywhere—a hundred different birds flitting through the trees, both species chittering and chattering at each other as they went about their business. There were giant snapping turtles and small, exquisitely patterned box turtles. Cranes bobbed and dipped their long, graceful necks in the ponds while frogs leaped from their lily pads in startled apprehension from our approach.

The land was flat, as most of Florida is, but there were dips and bends, shallow depressions, and rickety wooden bridges over ice-cold, bubbling streams. In short, I had just discovered a major hiking event with a modern twist. Instead of just hiking prepared paths that wind through the wilderness, I was now slinging discs at distant baskets, across fairways carved in strategic patterns through a world of green, brown, grays, blues, great bars of shifting sunlight, and the shadows of a million twisting branches, ever swaying in the summer breeze.

I was hooked. Soon enough, I discovered that all disc golf courses are like this and there are thousands, growing in number across the US as disc golf quietly became the fastest growing sport in America.

Since that warm summer day in Blue Angel Park, I’ve played in nearly every state in the east. I’ve thrown 800’ drives off of a cliff on the Cumberland Plateau, played along the side of a mountain in Asheville, played across the bottom of a gorge in Georgia, seemingly carved by the great shambling footsteps of a giant.

Every disc golf course is different. The terrain changes. The patterns of the fairways are new and exciting. Sometimes I throw through narrow tunnels, flanked by oak and maple sentinels to either side. Sometimes I throw across corn fields that stretch beyond the horizon. Sometimes I put my shoulder socket to the test when launching an ultra high-speed disc across 800' of open, freshly mown grass.

Here's an aerial shot, from my Ruko Drone, of the first and last two holes at Pat Lunsford Blackwater Disc Golf Course.

Throwing under the power lines presents its own challenge. I need at least 450' of distance on my first throw but I have to keep the disc low, streaming through the air currents 10' above the ground, faster than a baseball pitch. At the tee box for hole three, I'm throwing from under the power lines, deep into the woods, with the basket sitting in a thick pocket of low vegetation and young oaks.

Three weeks from now, it will be a battle of disc attrition as I skim my Latitude 64 Halo over a 56-acre lake in Cane Creek Park, Tennessee. The 18th hole is down in a ravine so steep that after your first throw, I'm descending a nearly vertical cliffside. I usually use my Halo for this throw and not always to great results, as you can see below.

That was a very lucky landing in the middle of the woods. While I didn't see any snakes down in that hole, I strongly suspected they were down there. The point of this entire diatribe is that it's been an adventure. I am now as thoroughly committed to exploring and hiking as I ever was to anything else. The only difference between myself and every other hiker out there, is I'm packing a stack of twenty, carefully chosen discs.

I have a Garmin Venu 2 with a U-Disc app, full GPS tracking (Glonass and Galileo included), power measurements in my disc drives, and distance trackers to calculate every success and every failure in all of their statistical glory.

The best part is, I'm no longer sucking up couch real estate in the living room. It took a break up, a long and dejected southward journey, and a curious new game to introduce me to the outside world again and I'm thankful for every bit of it.