Saturday afternoon, Aditya and I played all 27 holes at Bijou Disc Golf Course in South Lake Tahoe. Yes, that Aditya: the guy from my fantasy football league who just moved to town and can't stand up on a snowboard. It turns out he can throw a disc. Just not quite as well as me.
Full disclosure: on the very first tee I had to ask what the red and blue lines on the sign meant. They're two different basket positions for the same hole. Hole 1's A pin is 256 feet away and its B pin is 344, and both are par 3. By hole 27 I was basically a pro.
The course
Bijou has been in Bijou Community Park since 1995, and it's free to play. It's mostly flat, with tall pines, an open meadow and mountains in the background of almost every throw. There are 27 holes, and each one has between two and six basket positions, all listed on a big board by the first tee. Most are par 3. A few long ones are par 4, up to 670 feet on hole 18.
Every tee sign has an aerial map of the hole and a list of what's out of bounds. On hole 1 that's the pavement, the gazebo and the dog park. A set of discs runs about $40, which makes it a lot cheaper than flying or snowboarding. That's my kind of budgeting.
How it went
I took the front nine 33 to 38. Most of that lead came from hole 6, where I parred and Aditya made a 6. He came back on holes 10 to 18, winning three out of four in the middle of that stretch and taking those nine holes 33 to 34. On the last nine I birdied hole 21, the only birdie either of us made all day, and my lead peaked at 8 strokes.
Final score: me 99, Aditya 107. I won 11 holes, he won 6, and we tied the other 10. (We counted every hole as a par 3, which puts me at +18 and him at +26. A few of those holes may have had par-4 pins in, so we were probably a stroke or two better than that. Probably.)
The Smirnoff Ice bet
With two holes left, we made a bet: whoever lost the last two holes had to drink a Smirnoff Ice. We both made 4 on hole 26 and 3 on hole 27, so the bet ended in a tie and nobody drank anything. That works out, since the park rules say no alcohol anyway.
Replay the round
Tap any hole to see our scores and how the lead changed, or hit replay and watch the whole thing play out.
