A novel course in Virginia’s Pure Bridge State Park is concentrated on forest succession and sustainability.
Standing within the Tamarack customer’s middle in late 2018, flipping by way of a West Virginia journey information, Jim Jones had an concept. The park supervisor of Pure Bridge State Park in Virginia landed on an article about disc golf programs. Studying concerning the breadth of choices in his neighboring state, his thoughts turned.
“I assumed, ‘That’d be fascinating,’” he remembers. “An journey sport like that form of matches with our mission and why not have the ability to get folks outdoor and on a path and revel in not simply the path, however a recreation of disc golf?”
Again in 2016, a bit of land in Rockbridge County that’s now a part of the state park was slated to grow to be an 18-hole conventional golf course. The enterprise by no means materialized, however indicators of the supposed improvement are nonetheless current. There are seen scars from the land razing, dormant sprinkler heads stay embedded within the floor, and some retired management containers for the irrigation system nonetheless dot the periphery. As soon as the realm turned a part of the state park, Jones and his crew modified course, first adopting it as an academic device, managing it as a pollinator area and using it for example of an early succession habitat. Because the disc golf concept took maintain and Jones pinpointed the recovering space as its location, he maintained his dedication to maintaining the realm’s regenerative initiatives in movement, fusing the 2 initiatives collectively.
“There’s early succession that’s there, it’s form of the beginnings of a forest,” says Jones of the realm. “What we are attempting to do is maintain a portion of that in that early succession, and in doing that we find yourself making a habitat for wildflowers and the thistle was one of many prolific wildflowers within the space, in order that’s the way it ended up getting its identify, Thistle Ridge.”
Jones himself doesn’t play disc golf. To make what’s now open because the Thistle Ridge Disc Golf Path, he outsourced the technical components of the undertaking to those that do. In 2019, whereas serving because the chair of Rockbridge Outdoor—a neighborhood group of greater than 40 organizations and companies with a shared dedication to out of doors recreation and stewardship—Jones linked with James Dick, the director of out of doors training at close by Washington and Lee College, who was recruited to help with the path design whereas additionally serving as a conduit between the park and the native disc golf neighborhood.
“He was form of the bridge between the park’s mission and what a disc golf participant would need,” Jones says.
Dick launched Jones to Brian Hamelman, a founding member of the native Rockbridge Disc Golf Membership. It was Hamelman who introduced the attention of an skilled participant to the undertaking.
“Brian truly introduced the experience and with the ability to lay out a singular, artistic, and fascinating disc golf course that we hope lots of people are going to essentially take pleasure in,” says Jones. “He was principally our golf professional, the one who laid out and designed the course.”
For almost a yr main as much as the course’s opening, Hamelman and a bunch of Rockbridge Disc Golf Membership members confirmed up on the course on the third Saturday of each month to chop trails, set up baskets, and construct tee pads. Hamelman turned particulalry excited by the realm’s options. The topography, the sweeping views, the open, tree-lined fairways. It might be the proper complement to the prevailing native course on the Washington and Lee campus, which has shorter holes and may be very technical and wooded.
“The land itself was actually, actually lovely,” says Hamelman of Thistle Ridge. “As we began engaged on this undertaking, I believe a variety of lightbulbs went off in Jim’s head about making it as inexperienced as attainable and connecting it to nature.”
The again of a Thistle Ridge scorecard shows several types of bushes seen on the course, from American Persimmons to Virginia Pines. And a welcome signal affirms the park’s dedication to managing the course’s fields particularly for pollinator habitat. Different sustainability options embrace the tee pads. Stepping as much as every gap, visitors will discover a smooth, powdery materials underfoot, a byproduct of roughly 1,800,000 recycled glass bottles that have been floor up and packed, roughly 100,000 kilos apiece, into every tee field. The indicators subsequent to the tee containers, displaying the size, map, and par of every gap, have been created by Hamelman.
Past the work of Hamelman and Dick on the micro features of improvement, Jones was additionally blown away by the macro (learn: financial) help his concept acquired from the local people. The Rockbridge Neighborhood Well being Basis contributed $25,000. Washington and Lee College contributed $4,500, which was then matched by disc golf firm Innova by way of the Matching Baskets Program, giving Thistle Ridge its 18 new baskets. These three, Jones says, together with the Buddies of Pure Bridge State Park, have been instrumental in funding the undertaking, turning Jones’ West Virginia daydream right into a Virginia actuality.
Thistle Ridge, which formally opened final June, comes at an ideal time for a neighborhood disc golf neighborhood that has flourished because the onset of the pandemic. Hamelman says that, whereas Rockbridge County nonetheless has smaller numbers than the golf equipment in Bedford, Richmond, and Charlottesville, it’s an ardent, close-knit, and, as of late, increasing group.
“Disc golf is certainly rising on this space,” he says. “On this neighborhood it means companionship, sportsmanship, friendship. It’s a extremely enjoyable space to get along with the identical group of individuals week to week and problem one another and develop as gamers.”
Disc Golf World Championships Coming to Virginia
The 2024 PDGA Skilled Disc Golf World Championships will probably be held in Virginia, marking the primary time the high-profile occasion will happen within the Commonwealth. The game’s prime gamers will compete on two programs in and round Lynchburg, Va., with the occasion working from August 21-25. The Professional Worlds will characteristic a newly constructed course with principally open terrain on the Ivy Hill Disc Golf Membership, and motion may even happen on a extra wooded course on the New London Tech Disc Golf Membership in Bedford County. Extra particulars will probably be launched quickly at pdga.com.
Cowl photograph:
Thistle Ridge Disc Golf Path Gap 5. All pictures courtesy of Virginia division of conservation and recreation.
