Pros:
It is a wonderful treat, and a great asset to the pursuit of disc golf in general, that such a wonderful piece of park property has been made available for use as a course. I made a special effort to stop by and play here with my fiancee while on a business trip to the region, and I will remember it fondly for the rest of my life.
The trees are absolutely gorgeous, and the swiftly flowing river provides for a wonderful background sight and sound to the entire course.
The course itself offers a variety of different kinds of shots and challenges. The one thing this course has more than any other, and certainly uses, is space. There is a lot of space, and the holes are almost all scaled up to fill it out. This is a big arm course, and will test the limits of accuracy vs. distance in everyone's game. This is also a great course to try out a variety of roller shots. There are big left and right turning fairways, tight shots through corridors of trees, and punishing rough if the disc goes astray.
We had few problems finding most holes and pads, and the arrangement was quite nice and easy to follow except...
1. on the back 9 I recall there being a very long excursion from a hill in the woods at basket 3 down to the open area by the parking lot on tee pad 4,
2. on the front 18 there was an excursion into the woods around hole 13-14 or so that we initially had trouble following, but got it the second time around on a replay.
The park is clean, except for some Coors Light cans and such. Rubbish bins are plentiful and there are several very well-maintained restrooms along portions of the course, which is especially good for women disc golfers.
Cons:
Note that the cons listed here shouldn't dissuade anyone from playing here...you should go to Riverbend, it is a wonderful place. My criticisms should be taken lightly, but I feel I should offer something.
The vast expanses of the park property, and its setting in general, virtually ensure that any course layout at McIver will be a wonderful experience. I got the feeling, however, that the course's design was somewhat haphazard in some ways (I'll give examples below), but the park itself and the large spaces available allow that a less than ideal course design can still remain one of the best around.
There are vast, long, open strips and spaces for fairways. I feel that the current course design uses these in a bit of a gluttonous fashion, by simply laying out huge tracts from pad to basket across what might otherwise comprise several more exquisite and thoughtful holes. Hole 2 on the 18 front course is a great example of this...1200 or so feet of amazing fairway with nice groves and patches of trees along the way are simply given over to a single hole. Sure, this is an epic hole, and one that I'll tell all my friends about, but one wonders if this space might not have been used more wisely. I'm not saying that I don't like the holes as they are, but rather that I don't quite feel like the course space has been optimized for its full range of potential and diversity.
Other holes sometimes start seemingly at random in a glade and end at a basket seemingly placed at random in some trees off to the side.
The landscape is mostly flat, so the course is missing some of the elements one finds in other courses with big up or down hill grades (with the minor exception of a couple of holes that tee off from a wooded hill).
I lost a new esp avenger ss disc on the back 9 by the river. Truth be told, this course will wear you down and you'll probably shank a shot or several after a while and the river will most certainly eat your disc. Be prepared and willing to lose a disc or two so that you won't mind so much when it happens.
Other Thoughts:
This ordinary layout course wore me down like a big tournament course would do, and at the end of the day I was satisfied and thoroughly happy as well as tired.
Final thought...Is this the best disc golf course on the west coast? My gut feeling is to say no, it is not the best course for disc golf purposes alone. My benchmark course for comparison is DeLaveaga in Santa Cruz, and I feel like each of the holes there is a delectable treat, like something to be savored and admired for its arrangement in terms of disc golf purposes. I don't feel like Riverbend quite measures up in that respect, although it is a wonderful place to play disc golf.