Heads up! Area disc golfers are meeting to crown the bosses of tosses.
The sporting public is invited to participate in the fourth annual Wunderment disc golf tournament at the Wasatch Wunder course at Wasatch Mountain State Park in Midway at 9 a.m. this weekend.
Intermediate and advanced players will throw through 21 holes, with different courses on Saturday and Sunday, and cumulative weekend scoring. Beginners and age-protected competitors will play 18 daily holes. The tournament costs $65 to enter, and all participants receive commemorative competition discs along with trophies for placements.
The Professional Disc Golf Association is hosting this XC-tier event, which allows non-member play and guarantees that 25% of the purses benefits Elevate UT Disc Golf, the nonprofit dedicated to building municipal-quality facilities.
“The spring tournament is really special because we’ve got six holes that run along the creek that play dramatically differently when there’s water in there,” said Scott Belchak, who founded Elevate UT and designed the Wasatch Wunder in 2022. “Of course, you might lose your disc.”
Ben Marolf owns Another Round Disc Golf in Murray and will be competing in the Wunderment’s Mixed Pro Open division.
“There’s a lot of very memorable holes up there because of the way the course was designed into the forest,” Marolf said. “It lends itself to some tricky, thin, really hard-to-hit gaps. It’s not the world’s longest course, but it’s a satisfying one to play well, and it’s beautiful. When I’m going to play up there, I don’t care a ton about how I place. The event is so fun. It’s just nice to be up there with a bunch of people tossing frisbees.”
The course takes 2.5 hours to complete, with concrete pads, beginner accommodations and shaded seating at each tee. Hole 1’s elevation is 6,000 feet, and the course ends at 5,400 feet.
“You go through several different biomes as you’re there, so it’s kind of a journey when you play,” Belchak said. “There’s hops growing down on hole 12. The view from hole 10 across all of Midway and the whole Heber Valley is just fantastic. There’s no place like it.”
A native Utahn, Belchak discovered disc golf while living in Minnesota and brought his passion back with him when he returned in 2020. He met an enthusiastic community of players whose homemade course plans had often succeeded past their carrying capacities and began advocating for professional constructions to last for generations.
“I built Elevate UT Disc Golf to help municipalities understand their lack of infrastructure surrounding these public spaces where there’s hundreds of thousands of hours poured in by the public by using them every year and millions of footsteps that happen on these grounds every year, and when millions of footsteps happen, they need to be prepared for that,” Belchak said.
He pitched his course plan to Wasatch State Park manager Jonathan Hunt, who suggested the location around the campgrounds.
“I got to work designing nine holes and realized we’ve got enough space down here we could put 18 in, so Jonathan purchased nine more baskets, then we got started,” Belchak said. “That first couple years, we put about 2,000 volunteer hours into the course between 60 people. We built that thing with just blood, sweat, tears and basically no cash at all.”
Last year Elevate UT received $120,000 in a combination of grants from Wasatch County TAP and the Utah Office of Outdoor Recreation that funded course upgrades and standardization.
“This tournament is our celebration of completing the grant process and being fiscal stewards of county and state money,” Belchak said. “It’s built to instill a love of the game to people because, if you can capture the imagination of people with these public spaces, then they’re going to become stewards of the land, and it creates this recursive, repeating cycle of volunteerism and stewardship.”
As the state park ecosystem includes nearby campgrounds, a golf course and pioneer orchard, the disc golfers’ hard work proved immediately beneficial during the runoff after 2023’s record-breaking snowfall.
“We had to hike that creek before runoff started because there was so much detritus from years and years of that creek never being cleaned up,” Behchak said. “The creek area, from the holes we had built, was pretty much clear already because we had volunteers go in there and beautify and clear the creeks. I’m pretty sure that if the disc golf course wouldn’t have been installed, the creeks wouldn’t have been able to contain the water that was going to barrel down that mountain, so in the end, I think disc golf saved the park from that monumental year.”
Preregistration is available at online at discgolfscene.com.