3 Years in the making, Squaw Creek Gold is a reality!!!

In 2011, Brett Comincioli, club president of the Discontinuum Disc Golf Club of North Eastern Illinois, went to the Round Lake Area Park District with a dream.  A dream of bringing a championship level disc golf course to NE Illinois.

3 years later, that dream is a reality.  What was once a firmly mediocre 18 hole disc golf course in Round Lake, Illinois is now a 36 hole, two course layout that sits on almost triple the land the original course layout occupied.  What were crushed limestone, rutted tees, are now perfectly placed concrete.  Where there were no tee signs, there is now a clearly marked course route.  Where there was a course (a mere 5 minutes from my house) that I regularly drove past to play other courses 1-2 hours away, there is now a course that gets 95% of my play.

This is what disc golf is supposed to be!  I know for many of you who live in disc golf meccas, having a great course nearby is old hat.  But for us here in NE Illinois, we are surrounded by a myriad of pitch and putt, poorly thought out, poorly designed courses.  While there are some very strong courses mixed in, none ever made me say, WOW!!!  Until now.

As I mentioned, there are two 18 hole routes to be played on this new layout. Some holes are shared between the white and gold layout, some are not.  On the shared holes, there are either white and gold tees with a shared basket, or a shared tee with a separate white and gold basket.  There is also a great 28 hole route if you are up for it (outlined at the bottom of this post for the adventurous among you).

The white course is a fun, somewhat shorter (5020 ft.) course.  It’s a great warm up for the beast that is the gold course. The gold course sits at 8075 feet with an optional “stockade” hole at the end which would add another 275 feet.

In that 8075 feet, there are 5 par 4’s and 3 par 5’s.  On many holes, you not only can’t see the basket, you can’t see the first landing area either.  This is disc golf like we’ve never had in these parts. One of the first thoughts I had, a year ago when playing object golf on the new layout well before tees and baskets went in, was, “It sure would be nice if there was some kind of course guide or something that allowed me to see how far things are and what’s going on with each hole.”

And with that thought the Squaw Creek Gold DGC Course Guide Book was born. Well, that thought plus 80+ hours, 826 raw images, 1 Sony NEX 5TB camera, 3 Sony lenses, 2 Zeiss lenses, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and a Bushnell laser range finder.

You can download both a mobile version and high res, print ready versions here.

I hope you enjoy the book and the course, it is truly a special place to me.

For the diehards, here’s how to play 26 unique holes, all routed in a row with no excessive walks from basket to next tee.

Gold 1-6, White 7-12, Gold 7-16, White 13-15, Gold 17-Stockade.  Page 3 of the course guide has the course map on it so you can see how well this route lays out.