St. Peter Riverside Park reviews
10
0
Didn't like it? Play it in late fall. Perfection!
Reviewed:
Updated:
Played on:Nov 16, 2023
Played the course:once
Pros:
1. Outstanding piece of property along the Minnesota River (the first big tributary to Old Muddy).
2. 100 foot tall trees of at least 4 different varieties that I could tell with leaves down. And thousands of them.
3. Long tees are good and easy to find. UDisc almost optional. Metal arrows to next tee.
4. Boomer's paradise. This is a long-ish course (6089 ft, par 58) with broad fairways that will seem like super-highways to the talented/polished.
2. 100 foot tall trees of at least 4 different varieties that I could tell with leaves down. And thousands of them.
3. Long tees are good and easy to find. UDisc almost optional. Metal arrows to next tee.
4. Boomer's paradise. This is a long-ish course (6089 ft, par 58) with broad fairways that will seem like super-highways to the talented/polished.
Cons:
1. It's a flood plain. There is no elevation change at all.
2. Speak of floodplain, I estimated the level of this flat as a pancake course to be 20 feet above the water today (see below for more info).
3. Old Innova Discatchers. They are faded and bent, but to be fair, they still catch nicely.
4. Missing tee signage on #5 and #11.
5. Short tees can be hard to find. Rather than concrete, they tend to be a cluster of cobblestones, not large enough to x-step on. Grass is all flat though. Slower throwers probably don't need a large concrete pad.
2. Speak of floodplain, I estimated the level of this flat as a pancake course to be 20 feet above the water today (see below for more info).
3. Old Innova Discatchers. They are faded and bent, but to be fair, they still catch nicely.
4. Missing tee signage on #5 and #11.
5. Short tees can be hard to find. Rather than concrete, they tend to be a cluster of cobblestones, not large enough to x-step on. Grass is all flat though. Slower throwers probably don't need a large concrete pad.
Other Thoughts:
This review is brought to you by one of those "Always have your discs in the car" moments. I stopped for a round on the way home after getting a couple of spinal injections in Mankato. At no point did the discharge instructions mention that I shouldn't throw a frisbee one hundred times today.
The local conditions at the time of this review were temperatures 20 degrees above average for mid November, windy (25 gusting to 40), all the underbrush dead and all the leaves down. The fairways were nevertheless freshly mowed and perfect, really. I should have tried hitting some of them. See wind, above. Finally, I am no hydrologist, but I did a bit of environmental studies on my way to a medical degree 30+ years ago. I inferred from a tiny bit of sandy near-beach on both sides of the Minnesota that the river is probably just slightly below its baseline level. Preliminaries and context aside, onto the course review:
I like to put the conclusion somewhere up high in the review in case I lose you early. I absolutely loved this course. I shot the worst score out of 46 rounds played so far this year, but I loved it just the same. Here is the thing though:
I played it under absolutely perfect conditions, other than the wind, which was actually fun in a challenging way. I haven't yet given out the elusive 5 star review, but this was close. The last star was withheld for the conditions I am positive constrain this course, but weren't actually there today. Allow me to explain, starting with an anecdote.
I tossed my Leopard over the river bank accidentally on 10, but it was fading back toward the beach. I thought it was probably safe on the little micro beach, so I hurried forward and saw it down the bank, in the river, motionless in 6 inches of water. Easy-peasy. In scrabbling down the steep sand and dirt embankment, peppered with trip-wire roots that could have put me headfirst in the water below, but were helpful on the way back up. I did my best to estimate the height of the embankment. I got 20 feet using a couple of different methods. Remember that the river appears to be a little lower than baseline.
I have since looked up flood stage for the Minnesota at St Peter. It's 22 feet above baseline. You think the Mississippi River floods often? I've lived roughly 40 decades in this state. The Minnesota River floods every year. In higher flood years, about every 5-10 years, the road you would have come in on (169), at least 10-15 feet above the course, gets closed for flooding, although it was recently raised in some of the more vulnerable sections.
I digress. During flood stage, which happens nearly every year in April/May, this course is under water. That's why it's so danged flat. It doubles as a lake with some regularity. It will dry out in June and be a mosquito fest in July. Maybe, just maybe, by August it will be dry and very playable. I will tell you though that I threw through a lot of thin branches today that, if covered with leaves, would have been knockdowns. And, I ended up in woods, owing to the winds and an insufficiency of talent on my part, which would have been dense undergrowth. Previous reviews have mentioned you can lose discs here. Today, they were unbelievably easy to find--even the one in the shallows of the river's edge. Zero problems at all finding them on or off the fairways.
What I am taking too long to say is that if this is a course you want to bag, I strongly suggest that you do so after the first frost to eliminate the bugs and shrivel the rough, and when the leaves are mostly down, similar to what I exploited today.
Under such conditions, you will encounter predominantly blind par threes, with a mixture of banana right and banana left shapes. Not a ton of variety, honestly, and no really short ace runs. The course is board flat, but the designers have tried to mix this up with some elevated tees, elongated poles, and even one hole with the basket dug into a little bunker below the level of the surrounding green. Props.
So will you like this course? That depends. I think you're much more likely to do so in the fall as I've already made clear. Beyond that, are you a bomber? Green light and may the odds be ever in your favor. If you are, like me, not a bomber (I throw 270 max), do you care what par is. I mostly don't. If you look at a 360 foot hole blind basket, angled against the prevailing winds marked as a par three and get pissed off at the designer, then maybe you shouldn't stop here. I took the approach of collecting double and triple bogies on this sort of hole (of which there are many) and thinking about how I might save bogey on a second attempt. That I might never par them didn't bother me. The day before, I threw two birdies at Bassett Creek. I never had a decent birdie look today. It's a different kind of course, and it's awesome at being what it is.
One more anecdote. I was utterly alone on the course today. Three very large trees spontaneously fell over within 100 feet of me during my round. It's the old philosophical/epistemic conundrum with a twist: If a tree falls in a forest and brains you during a late fall round, will your body be found before spring. Sort of glad I didn't learn the answer to that, but it was slightly spooky. The deer, hiding along the fairways from time to time, didn't seem nearly as unnerved by the falling lumber as I was.
If you bag this course and are looking for something else to do, I recommend the Treaty Site Museum about 10 miles upriver (SE toward Mankato). It's a bit sobering how many legally binding promises, as determined by the US Supreme Court, were made in this area to Native peoples only to be violated as soon as was convenient to European American settlers looking to enrich themselves. It happened though, and not learning about it won't make it not be true.
The local conditions at the time of this review were temperatures 20 degrees above average for mid November, windy (25 gusting to 40), all the underbrush dead and all the leaves down. The fairways were nevertheless freshly mowed and perfect, really. I should have tried hitting some of them. See wind, above. Finally, I am no hydrologist, but I did a bit of environmental studies on my way to a medical degree 30+ years ago. I inferred from a tiny bit of sandy near-beach on both sides of the Minnesota that the river is probably just slightly below its baseline level. Preliminaries and context aside, onto the course review:
I like to put the conclusion somewhere up high in the review in case I lose you early. I absolutely loved this course. I shot the worst score out of 46 rounds played so far this year, but I loved it just the same. Here is the thing though:
I played it under absolutely perfect conditions, other than the wind, which was actually fun in a challenging way. I haven't yet given out the elusive 5 star review, but this was close. The last star was withheld for the conditions I am positive constrain this course, but weren't actually there today. Allow me to explain, starting with an anecdote.
I tossed my Leopard over the river bank accidentally on 10, but it was fading back toward the beach. I thought it was probably safe on the little micro beach, so I hurried forward and saw it down the bank, in the river, motionless in 6 inches of water. Easy-peasy. In scrabbling down the steep sand and dirt embankment, peppered with trip-wire roots that could have put me headfirst in the water below, but were helpful on the way back up. I did my best to estimate the height of the embankment. I got 20 feet using a couple of different methods. Remember that the river appears to be a little lower than baseline.
I have since looked up flood stage for the Minnesota at St Peter. It's 22 feet above baseline. You think the Mississippi River floods often? I've lived roughly 40 decades in this state. The Minnesota River floods every year. In higher flood years, about every 5-10 years, the road you would have come in on (169), at least 10-15 feet above the course, gets closed for flooding, although it was recently raised in some of the more vulnerable sections.
I digress. During flood stage, which happens nearly every year in April/May, this course is under water. That's why it's so danged flat. It doubles as a lake with some regularity. It will dry out in June and be a mosquito fest in July. Maybe, just maybe, by August it will be dry and very playable. I will tell you though that I threw through a lot of thin branches today that, if covered with leaves, would have been knockdowns. And, I ended up in woods, owing to the winds and an insufficiency of talent on my part, which would have been dense undergrowth. Previous reviews have mentioned you can lose discs here. Today, they were unbelievably easy to find--even the one in the shallows of the river's edge. Zero problems at all finding them on or off the fairways.
What I am taking too long to say is that if this is a course you want to bag, I strongly suggest that you do so after the first frost to eliminate the bugs and shrivel the rough, and when the leaves are mostly down, similar to what I exploited today.
Under such conditions, you will encounter predominantly blind par threes, with a mixture of banana right and banana left shapes. Not a ton of variety, honestly, and no really short ace runs. The course is board flat, but the designers have tried to mix this up with some elevated tees, elongated poles, and even one hole with the basket dug into a little bunker below the level of the surrounding green. Props.
So will you like this course? That depends. I think you're much more likely to do so in the fall as I've already made clear. Beyond that, are you a bomber? Green light and may the odds be ever in your favor. If you are, like me, not a bomber (I throw 270 max), do you care what par is. I mostly don't. If you look at a 360 foot hole blind basket, angled against the prevailing winds marked as a par three and get pissed off at the designer, then maybe you shouldn't stop here. I took the approach of collecting double and triple bogies on this sort of hole (of which there are many) and thinking about how I might save bogey on a second attempt. That I might never par them didn't bother me. The day before, I threw two birdies at Bassett Creek. I never had a decent birdie look today. It's a different kind of course, and it's awesome at being what it is.
One more anecdote. I was utterly alone on the course today. Three very large trees spontaneously fell over within 100 feet of me during my round. It's the old philosophical/epistemic conundrum with a twist: If a tree falls in a forest and brains you during a late fall round, will your body be found before spring. Sort of glad I didn't learn the answer to that, but it was slightly spooky. The deer, hiding along the fairways from time to time, didn't seem nearly as unnerved by the falling lumber as I was.
If you bag this course and are looking for something else to do, I recommend the Treaty Site Museum about 10 miles upriver (SE toward Mankato). It's a bit sobering how many legally binding promises, as determined by the US Supreme Court, were made in this area to Native peoples only to be violated as soon as was convenient to European American settlers looking to enrich themselves. It happened though, and not learning about it won't make it not be true.
5
0
Humpupoy
Experience:
14.3 years
4 played
4 reviews
Don’t lose a disc! 2+ years drive by
Reviewed:
Played on:Jun 30, 2021
Played the course:2-4 times
Pros:
~Challenging for beginners and intermediates
~Well maintained at time of playing
~Long and varied
~Not many other people
~Holes lead very naturally to next tee
~Signs and boxes at every tee
~Very scenic
~Well maintained at time of playing
~Long and varied
~Not many other people
~Holes lead very naturally to next tee
~Signs and boxes at every tee
~Very scenic
Cons:
~No wide open holes
~Fairway has been mowed on my visits, but the rough is...rough...high chance to lose a disc
~A few very short holes
~Fairway has been mowed on my visits, but the rough is...rough...high chance to lose a disc
~A few very short holes
Other Thoughts:
I consider this the best course in the area if you're ok with playing a little hide 'n seek with your discs. If you're not super accurate plan to spend a lot of time looking for your shots. The entire course is a wooded area, but both times I've been there the fairway is well mowed, contrary to older reviews here. I feel like this is a must play if you're driving through!
