A beautiful 18 hole course located within a scenic park nestled in the hills of West Virginia, this challenging course garnered our attention despite a heavy rain in the forecast.
While this course had no shortage of long holes, mandos, and challenging OB's, it was a great course for us to check out on our way home from the first disc golf road trip of the year!
If the Black Course sounds too difficult, this Park also offers a more recreational/intermediate player friendly White Course on the opposite side of the property as well as a Yellow Course that is great for beginners.
But this day, we played the Black Course, so...
Let's get into this review!
The tee box for 18 offers a great view of much of the park and course!
Course: Grand Vue Park, Black Course
Location: Moundsville, West Virginia
Tees: Mixed- Artificial Grass, Concrete, Asphalt, Stone
Baskets: Innova
18 Holes
What I liked:
very scenic
fun/challenging holes
artificial tee pads were clutch with the wet conditions
ropes on several holes attached to the baskets to measure out circle 1
What I didn't like:
some hazards didn't make a ton of sense except to keep players from nearby holes out of each other's way
lack of defined walking paths in some areas from hole to hole
Tee Boxes- 4.5/5
A pleasant surprise for this course was that several of the holes had beautiful artificial greens to tee off from. On our day, it was raining rather heavily and had been for hours, but these greens provided excellent traction and footing.
Other holes had a mixture of concrete pads, asphalt/stone, and mulch and were in very playable condition.
If this course got any knock for tee boxes, it would be that some of them were oddly short, in the 6-7 foot range, otherwise, the course tee boxes were great!
The awesome artificial grass tee box on Hole 4
Concrete tee box on Hole 18
Baskets- 5/5
The Innova Baskets were all in great shape, with flags affixed on top to make them more visible when terrain changes made it a little more difficult.
The Black Course has all black baskets, the whites had white, and the yellow had, you guessed it, yellow baskets. This seemingly minor detail greatly aided in navigating the course where the greens overlapped.
One of my favorite holes on the course!
Navigation- 4/5
The course had a map conveniently located at the beginning near Hole 1, but the map was not needed to navigate the course.
Every hole had excellent signage that indicated where the hole was, and the only limiting factor in finding the basket was the length of some of the holes.
Most holes had walking paths in between them, with only a few not, but still easy to figure out which direction to go with a little effort. Some baskets even had arrows pointing towards the direction of the next tee box.
What kept this course from receiving a 5 is the lack of clearly defined walking paths on all the holes with some looking required on a few to figure out where the next hole started.
Overall, the course was fairly easy to navigate for players who had never been there before.
The well designed map at the beginning of the course is very detailed and
easily gets you going in the right direction from hole to hole
The signs on every hole were a great touch and clearly marked any hazards, mando's, OB's, and the basket!
Difficulty- 3.5/5
The layout of the course on most holes is very open and not very technical.
To increase the difficulty however, the course is full of mando's and tight OB/hazard windows, as well as an island on a short, sub 200' foot hole.
Otherwise, the difficulty of this course lies in the length of it's holes, with half the holes being over 500 ft. and several exceeding the 700 foot mark.
If you have a big arm, you could play this course with little difficulty, but several holes take 3, 250+ foot throws just to get within 50 feet of the basket, so if you're not much of a distance thrower you may struggle to throw for par on many of the holes.
This course gets a 3.5 for difficulty because despite its length, its a fairly open course with not any noticeable difficulty that you would not see on your average course.
Appearance- 4.5/5
Despite being the end of winter and beginnings of spring, the course was in great condition.
It was muddy from the rain and melting snow but that was hardly the fault of the course and was in surprisingly great condition despite the weather.
There was some natural debris here and there that could have been tidied up, but otherwise, this course was very clean and very well taken care.
We especially liked that many of the holes had trash cans to help prevent littering, which was definitely working as there was very little trash strewn across the course.
Overall- 4.3/5
Overall, this is definitely a course you should check out regardless if you're in the area or not.
This course will certainly challenge you, especially testing your arm strength and stamina, but the challenge is well worth it to see how you fare on the course.
This course is technical enough to require use of most of the discs in your bag and will challenge your conventional methods and approaches of attacking certain holes due in part to the mando's and out of bounds/hazards that you must play around.
Because there are 2 courses at the same location, you could easily make a day of it and play both of them before heading home.
Additionally, there are a lot of activities at the course outside of disc golf including a very impressive zip line course.
All in all, we will not hesitate to make a return trip to play this course again, and try our luck on the white course!
So check it out!
Played this course before? Let us know what you thought of it in the comments!
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