Tees provide good traction, plenty of elevation to play with, friendly and knowledgeable disc golfers work in the Alyeska Mountain Shop. Two sets of tees.

You can't play it unless you are a guest of the Resort. The course is on the drainage for half the mountain, so it's not just soaked, it's covered with ankle-deep running mud which stains clothing and is very difficult to wash out. There are some safety concerns with the fairways of a few holes.

Before playing this course, I was not expecting much from a 9-hole course at a hotel. And yet, I was still disappointed. But, not for the reasons I was expecting. I expected a little, safe, sanitary disc golf course on a manicured lawn that was appropriate for little old ladies and their grandkids to throw Frisbees(R) at.

Instead, what I found was a gnarly, muddy, tough to play and difficult to walk course, with some worrisome flight paths.

Here's how I think this might have come about:

Once upon a time...

A hard-core disc golfer was working at the resort. Everyday he looked up at the extreme terrain and dreamed of installing a disc golf course on the ski hill slopes and in the woods. He convinced someone in management that the popularity of disc golf guaranteed that the investment would pay off. Management agreed, but only wanted it to be an amenity for the guests, thinking that getting only a few more families to stay in the hotel was worth a whole season's worth of admission prices from day-players.

So it came to pass that management turned the design of the course over to the hard-core disc golfer, but only allowed the course to be near the hotel, which meant it had to be placed on one part of one ski run, plus a little along the trail to the maintenance shed.

Given these constraints, the hard-core disc golfer then set out to make the course that would provide the most challenge to himself. With a lot of hard work, including building up suitable tee pads, he succeeded, but at the cost of compromising some design safety principles, pretending that the ground would not always be wet (ignoring the wetland plants that are growing there) and allowing some throws over places where they really shouldn't go.

OK, that story may not have any truth to it at all, but it lets you know what kind of course to expect.

So the result is a course that isn't really right for the hotel guest who wants to try disc golf, nor for the advanced player who wants a challenging course.

This doesn't mean the course isn't interesting and fun, it's just not worth the unpleasantness. I felt no desire to play it a second time.

If only the management had decided to put in a stand-alone, destination-quality disc golf course on the front of the mountain. Think of how big, fun, and dry that course could have been. <sigh>