Marana Rock now a full 18 + nice bench!

*

Word came in that Marana Rock, certainly the premier course in Southern Arizona, has finally been expanded to a full 18 baskets. Previously it had 18 holes, played two ways to 9 baskets. Normally I disdain that situation, but the beauty of the landscape and the general excellence and difficulty of the course (even at 2x9) overrode that. They've got nice concrete tee-pads on most holes (certainly will have then on all 18 eventually), good mowing, elevation change, and a lot of wildlife.

In Arizona in May you have to get up early to play. I don't get up that early, but I try. I got to the course around 10:30, to 85 degrees and zero clouds. Clouds are infrequent here, I've found.

*

Hole 1's the same as before, but just as bitch-assed. Elevated tee, elevated green. Not that long, but there is very little landing area to have a drop in. I've birdied this a couple times, but bogeys are more often. My first round I double bogey it. You can clink one off the basket and half the time it'll go rolling right down the hill. Second round I almost ace it. Almost means I missed it by a foot and shot by about 80 feet. Parred it though that time. Your shot upwards at the basket, sir?

*

*

Word on the street is that you want to get your birdies on the old 9, because the new 9 do not sound easy. Par is fine for hole 1. 2 is long, back uphill to an elevated green:

332 feet is a long way to go uphill. It's a tough drive because on many holes here, location is king. You can end up being behind palo verdes or mesquites and end up thorned just trying to get your disc, not even giving you a shot. Many of these baskets are located just on the top of bluffs, meaning you don't want to blow by. Both rounds today I have a birdie putt and miss it. Eh.

*

While you're up there, you have to birdie this one. Easiest birdie on the course. One of the few must-have birdies. I birdie it probably only 40% of the time because I blow. 241 feet downhill to that sandy green area on the left. A putter, really, or a roc. Easy to blow it by. And sometimes this course gets flooded and a number of the holes become very difficult to play. That makes this an island green, and the mud and water is just awful to trudge through. You'll lose a disc if that happens. Word, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, is that it flooded this last year only accidentally and should not again. We hope. Usually there's water only on 18.

*

4 is a perfect shot for me. They've cleaned this hole up a lot. When it's not mowed, there's 4 foot tall plantlife that is in the entire fairway. Aside from possible disc loss, there are real fears of stepping on a rattlesnake when you can't see where you're walking. The hole culminates in this lovely backdrop of evergreens:

*

I have to assume that they will certainly have an alternate basket placement back under those trees. There's a nice little slope up and then away.

Okay. Hole 5, first of the new 9, is an excellent departure. For the most part this course is (was) pretty open, with distance, wind, snakes, lizards, elevation, and various thorned plants as the major difficulties. 5 isn't that tight, nor technical. It plays 383 feet past that first clearing (below) with the bush in the center, then up to the right.


Tough for righties, since you do not want to be in the deep rough. If you drive to have a shot, easy par. A real good drive might give you a birdie run. None of mine did today, but I had an easy upshot both time around that resulted, more or less, in this:

Note the palo verde just pre-disc. These are extremely cool trees. They flower yellow in what, April? And they have no leaves. They are thorned, of course, like everything else in the desert, and their bark is green (that's where the chlorophyll goes). Inventive desert shit.

Okay, nice. Hole 5 is good. But hole 6 might be my favorite hole of disc golf I've played this year. It looks straightforward, except for the yardage:

What you can't see is that you're driving down from an elevated tee, eventually to an elevated basket. But the area you have to land your drive in is difficult to locate from the tee pad. It's a decent sized fairway, more left than right (though there's some crazy fairway out right). See the brown area in the center in this shot:

The basket is beyond. You probably want to throw a disc with some hyzer. My first disc, my fav beast, got launched. Monster drive, I thought. Awesome, I thought. But the fairway was not where I thought it was, nor was my disc anywhere to be found. This whole area--just mowed--felt like snakes. The ground gets rougher when you get down in the bottom fairway area. More on that in a bit. I look for 30 minutes. No beast. I am not snakebit at least. The second round, good news, I throw a better drive, with a wraith that tails just out into the fairway. I have a decent look at the basket, and get down in par. Also I find my beast wedged high in a tree. I get it down. Second round looking way up.

So from the fairway you have probably a 100-200' shot over a bunch of trees to a slightly elevated green, located conveniently on a little ridge:

It makes for a difficult, and essentially unbirdieable (with a putt anyhow) hole. Even if you have a monster drive, there's almost no way (unless you're a flat-out pro) you're driving the green. A good drive, 300-400' puts you in the fairway with a decent upshot, but birdies here will be very lucky. Punishment abounds left and right. The plantlife does not love you. If there's a headwind, even worse. But if you play it right, it's a great hole to par and feel good about.

*

Hole 7 is a little similar, but shorter, with a much bigger fairway, and not as elevated of a green. More mountains in the background (not much of one by Arizona standards, admittedly). The trees in front of you complicate things so you can't throw a flat drive all that far. And there's a lot of far left for you. Get your drive out in the fairway past the trees...

and find:

Kalichi! This shit is nasty. This is the ankle sprain village. You can't quite see it here, but the gaps can go a foot deep. Probably your disc could get swallowed if you got unlucky. Of course it's hard as rock. It's clay, superdried. It's more or less under everything in Tucson. It's the reason why the rainwater doesn't get absorbed all that well. It's also the clay that sucked my Croc off when I was foolish enough to play with Crocs, trying to save my shoes, with Jeff and Josh when we played this course and waded through a lot of water. Kind of fun actually. Keeps you cool. But still. This fairway is filled with this crap. It's a huge fairway. A fairly easy shot up to the basket. Not a real hard hole, except that the distance is hard to get on the drive because of those trees, and you'll need a long upshot to get par.

*

Hole 8 plays along a side hill. Pretty straightforward, though not short. Keep your disc in the fairway and you'll have a decent shot up for par. Basket's on the little ridge thing of course. Lots of crap right. Don't go right:

*

One of the nice features of this course (as is; I imagine there will be more official signage as it gets worked in) is that almost every hole has an obvious directional pointer towards the next tee. It's easy enough to find your way around. Since I've played a couple courses lately that are impossible to self-navigate, I get pissed when you can't find your way. Disc golf, while not a tourist sport exactly, does inspire travel. I travel for disc a lot. And I don't usually want to play with the locals if I don't want to. Tucson is of course a big tourist spot during the winter anyhow, so this is good thinking. Here's an arrow:

See? Nice. Other courses should do this too. Other holes on the course have lined pathways with logs to indicate the way to the next tee.

*

There's a little less to hole 9. You can't quite see the basket in this image, but it's a big hyzer shot to the basket. This one's doable. A very reasonable birdie. Maybe the best birdie on the new 9? Not the most interesting hole on the course. I deuced it and then parred it.

*

Hole 10 is shorter, but harder. It's uphill, probably a little turnover shot. Basket's up on the right a little--not visible in this photo, but you can see it in from the tee. Maybe a huge hyzer if you have it. I don't have it, I don't think, but I might give it a shot next time. If you miss right, there's a huge pile of tree over there. Definitely enough not to play it that way. But it's a little long uphill for a roc turnover. And with the wind coming up, not an easy hole.

Note also that a lot of the non-concrete tee boxes are framed by logs and branches. Nice.

*

Okay. So hole 11 is nicknamed Titanic. I've been looking forward to this, a real test of distance:

However, it's probably the most disappointing hole on the course. It's 773 feet. That's what it's about. If you get your drive on the fairway, then just, like throw it again until you get it to the basket. There's not a lot in the way. A couple scrubby pockets, but once you clear the plants on the drive that's about it. Should be parrable with two big throws. I was bored. Bored bored. Seems like they could have done more to locate the basket better or make you do more than just launch and launch. Hmmm. There's a lot of sand on this hole...?

Of course, having proclaimed my disappointment, I did not par this hole. I threw my drives--both times--into the only plant life you can hit on the drive (that make the hole less than trivial, I admit). So further play is required. But still, man, I want some stimulation!

Hole 12 has a little more to offer, but not a lot. It's not 773 feet, at least. It's a turnover drive, what, 364 feet?

Not particularly difficult. It's an attractive enough hole. I threw a big-ass hyzer on it and had a long birdie putt which chained out. Eh.

*

13 is much more solid. It's the end of the new 9. It plays to a drive on a slightly elevated green. Actually a very pretty hole though you can't tell by the photo. You probably want to throw a hyzer drive that finishes left. You can't throw it directly to the basket, even if you could throw it 413 feet, because there's trees in the way. You'd have to go big hyzer to try to get there, but an easier shot is to lay up a little, just let it finish on the left in the fairway. Tempting to go right, but there's a shitload of cabbage out there and who knows what else.

*

So, back to the original 9. See my earlier post for more details on these. 14 is a breath of air, a birdie hole. They've cleaned the rough and plantlife out a LOT on the left in this hole, making it much more humane. You used to get seriously punished if you went left. In fact, left wasn't even an option on this hole. Now it kind of is. Actually this hole looks entirely different:

*

And then 15, a big stretch of a hole. Close to driveable for me, but never quite so I have a makeable putt. The photo doesn't show too clearly, but it's a beautiful hole, spreads out in front of a slightly elevated tee, and down to a protected green. When you used to play back to this basket on the "back 9" before we had 18 baskets, it was actually one of the best holes on the course:

*

Evidently I skipped 16. It's a birdie hole with a big hill backstop. Fun little hole. By this time you really need a birdie.

17 is a bomb-ass hole. 402, big and downhill, then the basket's back up on a raised bluff/ledge thing. Lots of options here. The key is to throw it real frickin hard, and then not blow your putt by so you'll have to putt back out onto the drop off:

*

And the finishing hole:

75% of the year the low-lying, dried-out area on the right is filled with water which makes this hole more interesting. Even so, you don't want to be down there. Nor do you need to. It's not that long a drive. The water just adds much drama, a real penalty in case you fail to make the shot that you're pretty sure you can execute, that without water, you'd do it every time, but that water, it changes the psychological calculus. As water does for Arizona and the West in general, of course. So it's odd to have water in the equation here at all. This course is otherwise an excellent example of a desert course.

I'd love to have a couple more technical holes, but that would be tough to execute in this landscape. Maybe if Titanic gets revisited... but that's unlikely. The designers put this course together with a lot of love. I for one am glad to have it. There's so much space out here, I can't imagine we won't get a 27- or 36-hole version at some point, as the place and space deserves.

In the meantime, it will test your skills. Word is that the current singles record here is +4. I shot +14.

*

It's good that there's a water fountain up past 18. You'll need it here. I went through 4 24-oz bottles of water over my two rounds. It's not cold water--it never is in Arizona except in the winter or the mountains. And you'd be better advised playing morning or late afternoon. But I didn't want to wait. Now I await friends coming to town to test themselves. Sean arrives in a week and change. Erik and Nicole and Zoe come in Friday. Better to return to the pool and the mister on the porch and conserve my energy.