Pros:
This course plays through a diverse collection of hills dotted with a maze of scattered mature trees, some wooded areas, and a large open field. Terrain is in play on almost every hole, and every hole has ways of punishing bad shots.
This course will stretch your drives and give you plenty of opportunities to really unleash it, but it also punishes mistakes. It demands both distance, but it rewards shot placement. This is not a tightly wooded, highly technical finesse course like UW-Parkside. This is longer and more open, but still technical in its own right.
For me, the key to this course is long, controlled drives. The scattered trees give choices of lines, but to score well you will still need to pick which gap you want to thread. This course is challenging but fair. You can get tons of birdies here, but it'll take a pretty well placed drive, and probably a longer putt. This course doesnt give freebies. The abundance of terrain, and thus hillside pins, means that risk/reward is always a fact, even on putts.
Generally, I prefer tightly wooded, technical courses over longer, more open ones, but this course is quite well-done. It constricts your shots in many different ways: doglegs, low overhanging tree branch, narrow gap between two trees, even one perfect hyzer line thru a tree avenue to an opposing hilltop that a lone tree branch very effectively shuts down, forcing a straight shot that hugs the right side of the fairway and breaks right very late to get a possible birdie.
The wide open field holes on this course keep it interesting as well. The 600 ft hole has thre trees along the fairway to the left, and a line of shule to the right, ready to punish errant drives.
This course, IMO, is just the right level of difficulty. You have to drive fairly well and have good mid-game to get par, and birdies are very attainable if you can weave a long drive through the trees, but any hole on this course can trip you up for a stroke or two if you really fudge it up. The par 4's and par 5 are tough, and deserve their higher par, but birdies are possible here to. This course is a nice balance between distance and accuracy, with lots of cool holes that will keep you on your toes.
I feel like my distance increased after a day of playing both these two courses, because I got so many chances to just let it fly, versus teeing off with midranges on on every other hole like on some other courses. See for yourself if these two don't help your game in a similar fashion.
Cons:
Signage.
Pieces of particleboard have been elaborately painted with hole maps and distances and affixed to posts by every (long) tee, which would be great if anything but particleboard had been used. As it is, the signs on holes 4, 6, 7, 16 and 17 have disintegrated, through natural or other means, leaving bare posts. Holes 12 and 13, the 2 holes in the open field next to 600+ ft Hole 11, do not even have posts next to the tee, for whatever reason, and thus no signs either. Consequently, many people accidentally skip those two holes.
In fact, there are a few areas on this course where its easy skip a hole or two without realizing it. In particular, the transition from hole 7 to hole 8 is an easy one to miss. From basket 7, follow the path through the woods to your right. You'll see holes 2 and 3 in front of you, but Tee 8 is to your left.
A few holes have "short tees" displayed on the tee signs, which are dirt pads not marked in any way (except 3 short, marked with a wooden pole) so don't bother looking for them. It takes too much effort to figure out their approximate location, which usually isn't even a flat area, and since only about 7 holes have short tees, its really not worth it anyways.
Though usually you can see the basket form the tee, or at least see where the fairway goes, the thing that would benefit this course the most is signs directing you to the next tee, to help newbies out.
I almost wanted to rate this course as merely "good" due to the signage issues and the virtually nonexistant short tees, but as it stands, its still a very entertaining and reasonably challenging course with lots of terrain, which is just fine with only one set of tees. Also, from what I gathered, the locals are figuring out what kind of signage will stay in place before they replace anything that's already been broken, so hopefully people will respect the course and the signs will get better sooner rather than later.
Other Thoughts:
This park is huge, and apparently they are in the process of designing a third course, "South" in this park, to be opened at some point in the future. When I asked Bear, one of the local players, what it would be like, he told me West would be just a warmup for South, meaning a much longer, championship course. If the new course is as fun and well-designed as West, with great signage like East, there is no doubt in my mind it will be an Excellent course, but only time will tell. In the meantime, enjoy this course. The more people that play here, the more reason to build a third course, so check this place out if you're in the area.
With a third course in this park, it would really make things interesting, like a stairstep from East to West to South. Also, its so unusual to have more than 36 holes on a free public course, that this spot is worth checking out for that reason alone.
If you get tired of your discs hitting trees on West, head over to East for a break. If its your first time playing here, I would suggest warming up at East before playing this course. Since West has more terrain, trees, and distance than East, it will ease you into it, and you'll appreciate the superior course design of West that much more. I agree with previous posters, you will love one and hate the other. After my initial "warm-up" round on East, I stayed on West the rest of the day. I like West. East, not so much.