Hellyer Park

We went to a course in San Jose called Hellyer Park on Monday. We also wanted to play a course called Parque De La Raza that is right next to it. Unfortunately, we found that the second park is closed from November 1st to the end of April. (Monday was November 2nd - oops).

The course is located on a piece of land in between a freeway and a frontage road. On one hand, it does not seem like the ideal location, on the other hand, it is a nice use of land that would probably go unused. They have done a nice job of designing a disc golf course on the limited land available. The course is 9 holes long and each hole has a short and long set of tees from different angles. Each hole also has three possible basket locations. The baskets are moved around fairly frequently to provide different challenges.

Since the course was only 9 holes, we played the course twice, once from the short tees and once from the long tees. We had fun playing the course. None of the holes are particularly long, but elevation and basket locations were used to provide a variety of shots and obstacles. The course was well maintained, with nice cement teepads, informative signs for each hole, nice benches and bag holders on each hole. My only negative is that the freeway noise sometimes got obnoxious. We often had to shout to each other to be heard.

Another strange thing, the hillside above one portion of the course seems to be a dumping ground. You can see old couches and easy chairs littered across the hillside. Nothing really wrong with it, just seems a little strange.

After the round, we went for a late lunch at In-n-Out Burger. Yumm, Yumm - too bad we don't have one of these in Santa Cruz. Hmm, maybe that is a good thing. :-)