DISClaimer: This hole is still unfinished, so hopefully there will still be some changes made when the hole is done. The following narrative only recounts one experience on one particular day in May 2014.
Can any of you NC players guess what course it is?
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From basket 7, since there were no directional aids and several possible directions, I couldn't tell if hole 8 was in the woods or out in the open. I went out of the woods and found an unmarked tee pad but basket 8 was nowhere to be found. There was basket 9, though, on the edge of the pond, so I thought maybe this was the tee for 9 with 8 back in the woods. So I went back into the woods again, but I could find no signs of hole 8, so I headed back out into the open field near the pond. The tee was in an open field with the woods on the right side and the pond on the left side. The tee could be for the 9 basket but it didn't really point to the basket. This is hard to describe if you haven't seen it, but I will try. Going straight from the tee there is an uphill open grass field for about 220 ft then there is about 80 ft of thick weedy undergrowth several feet high. This undergrowth is also about 120 ft wide so you can't get around it to one side. This made no sense as a landing zone to drive into. As mentioned, from the tee you can see basket 9, but it is off to the left, by the pond. Since I couldn't find a basket 8 I thought that maybe there was no hole 8 yet, so I just played from this unnumbered tee to basket 9.
But when I got closer to the basket, about 300 ft from the tee, I found a winding walking trail cut through the very thick woods and another undefined cleared area to the right of this but separated by thick trees. The only purpose I could think of for this parallel cleared corridor was a fairway, but it came to an end and there was no basket there either. Oh, I also saw another black snake. After still more scouting I eventually found basket 8. I discovered that the hole is about 700 feet long, but you can't even see the basket until the final 100 feet or so! So then I walked all the way back to the tee, measuring the length by pacing it, and I started over playing hole 8.
To get as far as possible down the fairway I deliberately threw my drive right into the deep schule, about 260'. Thankfully the disc wasn't lost in thick weeds, but it could easily have been. The schule is so wide that unless you can throw an uphill shot of at least 300 ft (~350 ft equivalent length) you will land in the thick weeds. Farther past the dense weeds then you can see a gap to the corridor cut out of the woods. The gap into the fairway is rather narrow so a drive has to hit a rather small landing zone to be able to get into it. I was too far to the right, so I could only throw a short ~90 ft shot just to try and hit the start of thegap, which I missed. I dinked another little shot just to get in the fairway. Once you get in the corridor you must stay in the fairway because the rough is so thick that you can only toss back out to the fairway. I didn't keep every shot in the fairway, so I slowly worked my way forward until this corridor came to an end, and still the basket was not visible. It's hard to explain, but this corridor ends and then then there is a foliage obstructed area where the end of the fairway intersects the walking path. There is not a clear lane here so you have to loop an S shot out to the left with a left to right curve around the blocked area, but make it hyzer left back onto the fairway. Then you finally hit the last 100 feet of the hole, and at last you can see the basket! If you have gotten this far you are over 600 feet from the tee (which was lost to sight long ago). Getting to this point was a battle, but this a beautiful way to finish. The right side has a very deep drop off down a steep slope to a creek, so that creates high risk vs. reward. Then near the basket there are some very scenic white boulders. The first 600 feet still need serious work, but the finish helps ameliorate the stress of getting there.
