So,
Cherry Peak is a ski resort just above Richmond, UT. This year they put in a disc golf course that plays down the mountain. To get the word out, they hosted a grand opening tournament, sponsored by Dynamic Discs. The grand opening tournament turned into the 1st annual tournament. I did not enjoy my experience playing at Nordic Valley, another ski resort, a couple of weeks before the tournament but I thought that I would give it a try anyway. If it wasn't fun, I'd still have had the experience and just wouldn't sign up for the 2nd annual tourney.
I did the same thing with the tournament I played in 18 inches of snow in the bitter cold. I gave it a try and won't be back. The cool thing about that frozen tournament is that I met a guy there who has now been my doubles partners for a couple of tournaments this year with another one coming up in September.
The thing about playing down a mountain is how unfamiliar it is. What disc do you throw for a 300 foot shot that also drops 100 feet? And then there are greens like this one. If you over shoot the basket by 20 feet, you'll end up 50 feet away or more. Many of these greens you can stick on your drive, if you do it right. If you do it wrong, you can easily turn a par 3 into an uphill battle trying to prevent a bogey, double-bogey, or worse.
The amount of hiking being done up and down the mountain also means that most people were traveling as light as possible. When I have my cart, I have about 30 discs with me. A disc for every situation plus doubles of the ones that I really wouldn't want to play without to compensate for the ones I throw in a river. When I have my backpack, I take out most of the doubles and whittle the selection down to 17. For this course, I took 9 discs and 2 of them had doubles in case I chucked the first one down to the town at the base of the mountain. Okay, you probably wouldn't quite be able to do that but you could easily throw a disc over 1,000 feet with no chance of every finding it even if you had the energy to go down the mountain to look for it and hike back up. We were advised in the player's meeting that the 3 minute rule for lost discs was going to be enforced. When a player can't find their disc, all players must look for the disc for 3 minutes. If it hasn't been found before time runs out, the disc is declared lost and the player must rethrow with a 1-stroke penalty (which could mean climbing back up to the tee - a penalty in itself).
The reason for enforcing the rule was due to the nature of the course. Most tournaments have a shotgun start where players are scattered all over the course and start at the same time. When you have to ride a ski lift up most of the course and then get a lift in a side-by-side to get all the way up to the tee for #1, it becomes necessary to use tee times and have everyone start at the same hole. If one group stops to search for a disc for 20 minutes, it piles up all of the cards following. If you're the last card and several previous groups have done this, you'll be sitting on the mountain for hours. Luckily, we were the second card for the day so we didn't run into that issue. Not that there weren't other issues.
I had gone up a few days earlier to see what it was like and try to get a read on what discs I would be using. I ended up getting mixed up on a couple of the holes, playing to the wrong basket and skipping a hole (or maybe two) but it did give me some idea of what I was getting myself into. In the days between that practice and the tournament, I went through my discs and picked the ones that I would use. All of the ones I picked except two are discs that I never throw. Some of them I've never even thrown on a disc golf course. I've tried them out in a field and decided that they weren't a good fit for me and put them into a crate. I decided to dust them off and give them a try. Throwing unfamiliar discs on a course I didn't know how to play, what could go wrong?
I went into the day with a less than ambitious strategy. I wasn't necessarily going to try to put my disc as close to the basket as I could from the tee. Instead, I was going to try to not throw my discs off the mountain. I would just try to play a clean round and call it good enough.
There were 4 extra temporary baskets set up near the resort that we started on. I birdied one of them and parred the rest (bouncing my disc off the basket on two of my birdie attempts). Then we went up the mountain and I implemented my strategy. I quickly fell behind the other players on my card who were really trying to get birdies. About half way through, one of them turned a disc over and took a couple of extra throws to get back up to the basket. In the next four of five holes, one them made small mistakes here and there letting me sneak up into second place on my card. On the second to last hole, a 275 foot shot down a not-as-steep hill into some trees, the leader on our card shanked his throw and ended up about 400 feet to the right in a canyon about 200 feet below the basket. I got par and the other two got birdies. It took the leader several shots to get back up to where the basket was. I didn't really pull into first place. It was more that I stayed where I was and he fell to third place on our card.
I took on the role of the slow and steady tortoise and hoped the hares slipped up along the way. As it turned out, I ended up taking first place in Advanced Masters. With this little bit of experience, I will be choosing different discs next time and won't be playing so conservatively. Still, the cost of mistakes on this course is so high that there will still be holes that I play knowing that the likely outcome will be par. I'll just be more selective of when I play it safe and when I go for it and my "safe" will hopefully be more on target and less on the super safe side.
Oh yeah, there is one time when you do want to throw you disc a thousand feet down the mountain. Hole #18 is about 1,000 feet from tee to basket. I made it about 700 feet before my disc faded to the left and landed on a nice flat spot above the gulley we were playing down. I needed to throw it harder and at more of a downward angle. I'll try again next year.