With a decent round at Adventures on the Gorge’s Raven’s Ridge and a busted round at Chestnut Creek Campground with Seth, before we headed south for 4 nights at Summerville Lake we went north for supplies and 18 holes at ACE Adventure Resort’s Wonderland course.
The online description:
The course spans 40 acres winding around the crown of Wonderland Mountain. The holes vary from rolling meadows and pastures to tight and technical. The course is still a work in progress with additional signage, grounds keeping, mowing and tee work to be done. Please be patient with our progress and enjoy the course for its rugged “mountaineer” charm. The mailbox near the parking area has course maps available inside.
The Genxunderground description:
The course sits at the top of Wonderland Mountain, adjacent to tent camping for 10,000, an odd music event space, and a paint ball farm. The holes vary from overgrown thickets of brush loaded with bugs to wooded and technically unplayble. The course is very much a work in progress with little sign of progress in signage, mowing or trash removal. You will need to be patient and a lover of bugs and/or mushrooms to enjoy this mountain charm. The mailbox near the parking area can be used to hold your trash.
ACE Adventure Resort is the ultimate playground for getting your crazy fun on. Of course there is raft, zip, hike, bike. And inflatable water obstacles,
And massive camping for music festivals surrounded by forest
And phenomenal mushroom hunting with more than a dozen new finds
Excited for a long course with mountaineer charm, we found parking, but no course map as the mailbox contained nothing but an empty can of bug spray and an empty Snickers wrapper.
Hoping the course would reveal itself, we teed off then waded through knee high thicket looking for discs that flew fairly straight but got swallowed up on landing. Some we found by accidentally stepping on them. Every once in a while we’d find a map like this one, hanging from a wood block on a post. Not as helpful as you might expect.
We played through 1, couldn’t find 2, slogged through 3, lost a disc on 4, found this epic mushroom that looks like flowering cabbage on 5
Waded through 6-12, finding the beverage stop on 8
and marched on til we found the tee box for 13 but couldn’t see the basket. Hiking ahead, this is where we hit the limit and headed back to the bikes. Their definition of work in progress and our definition are not aligned.
We had a few laughs as the absurdity of it all, but the new mycologist in the family is ecstatic with her sightings. Now that she has an iPhone 8 and the Field Guide to Mushrooms book, she just needs a flat bottom basket, wax paper, removal tool, field note cards and a 400x microscope to get started in a new career. New things to thrift for!