I was in Atlanta for the 2012 Women’s Flat Track Derby Association Championships, so I thought I’d bring some discs and check out the local courses. I didn’t have a car, so I was at the mercy of anyone else who wanted to play some disc golf with me. Thankfully, there were three other folks interested in playing. Killsbury Doughboy, Garrison Killer, and Crop Dustin and I piled into Dustin’s van and drove a couple of miles to the course.
Just for comic relief, I’ll explain how three of us ended up taking a beating.
So as you can tell, the course can be a little tough to navigate. But I firmly believe it is worth it. I had a great time playing (it helps that I played really well) and my foursome was hysterical to play with. The bonus of the day was that someone found my lost disc later that afternoon and through a couple of emails, brought it to my hotel in downtown Atlanta. Southern hospitality at it’s finest. Thank you, Jacob Lawson from Atlanta! Much appreciated!
www.pdga.com/course_directory/course/perkerson-park
The course was installed in 2012, so it’s got some breaking in to do, but honestly, the course is quite awesome. Maybe not as awesome for new folks, but for me, I loved it and woudl recommend it highly, especially if you can't get out of Atlanta proper to play one of their many other courses. I’ll give you the overview: There are a couple of 800 footers through this 50-acre wooded park in South Atlanta. Thankfully, half of the course is maneuvering through super tall massive oak trees and the other half is through more narrow forest, but with obvious fairways. Excellent use of elevation and tricky pin placements (without being mean). There is a large creek that flows through the entire course and it comes into play often, but in a reasonable way. There are a couple of sticker bushes to avoid if you get off the fairway and there was a surprising amount of trash on the course, like it used to be a city dump or something. It looked like they were slowly cleaning it up, but we found all kinds of tires, baby carriages, playpens, clothing, broken glass, glasses, metal bars, and a random football helmet (thankfully with no head inside).
The course is fairly well marked out with signage, but it also looked like they had just had some sort of university tournament recently. So there were signs on trees and posts. But just to be sure, find the map on the PDGA.com site and either print it out or have it on your phone. It saved us a ton of time, especially finding the first hole.
On hole 1, you walk up the side of the hill and throw off a 30-foot cliff over the water. Crop Dustin thought he’d see how steep the cliff was, when he lost his footing and suddenly disappeared from our view. There was enough of a slop on the hill that he didn’t drop straight down, but he scuffed his calves up pretty badly as he slid down. Thankfully, he ended up laughing about it, even after he lifted his pant legs to show us the damage.
On #11, the 400 foot hole has a nice open fairway with a creek on the left. The creek has 4 foot high sheer rock walls, and plenty of rocks in the bottom of the creek. Killsbury Doughboy throws his shot over the creek and decides the bridge by the basket is too far to walk and come back to his disc. He slides down the rock wall onto the rocks, turns to us and says, “getting down here is the easy part.” He then takes one step, slips on the wet rocks and ends up on all fours in the mud and water, absolutely cracking up at the timing. Hilarious. Although, he had a brand new shirt on that will now require some laundering.
On hole 18, you get to throw 800 feet with the carnivorous creek on your left again. I throw a couple of awesome shots, but don’t’ see where my final shot lands. We searched for about 15 minutes before giving up. I thought I’d check out the creek from the bank. I took a bad step and slid off the rock wall, as I fell, I reached out and grabbed a branch. Unfortunately, the branch wasn’t attached to anything, so I dropped into the creek on my side. Sadly, where I fell was entirely rocks. I got some bad bruises, but nothing was broken, thankfully. Only one disc lost - that's a win in my book.
So as you can tell, the course can be a little tough to navigate. But I firmly believe it is worth it. I had a great time playing (it helps that I played really well) and my foursome was hysterical to play with. The bonus of the day was that someone found my lost disc later that afternoon and through a couple of emails, brought it to my hotel in downtown Atlanta. Southern hospitality at it’s finest. Thank you, Jacob Lawson from Atlanta! Much appreciated!
www.pdga.com/course_directory/course/perkerson-park
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