Highland Park Disc Golf Course

Highland Park has been Saint Paul park land since 1925, when the city bought an undeveloped tract at the urging of Parks Commissioner Herman Wenzel and filled it within seven years with a golf course, tennis courts, ball fields and a 2,700-seat stadium. The disc golf course occupies the Montreal Avenue and Edgcumbe Road corner of that same park, looping around the Old Highland Pool House — a 1936 Works Progress Administration building whose future the city is still working out with neighborhood groups. Saint Paul's published rules-and-map sheet puts the layout at 18 holes and 4,346 feet, with holes from 143 feet (hole 5) up to 349 feet (hole 10). The city doesn't publish a par for the course, so we don't list one.

It's free, no permit, sunrise to sunset, and you bring your own discs. Because the course threads through a busy developed park rather than sitting on its own parcel, the city's rules are stricter than usual: roads, parking lots and paved pedestrian paths are always out of bounds, a disc that lands out is played from three feet in bounds, and players are asked to stay clear of a stabilized ravine slope with sensitive vegetation and a stream channel. The rest of the park — aquatic center, two playgrounds, picnic pavilion and shelter, a sledding hill and cross-country ski trails in winter — is busy on warm weekends, so expect foot traffic across the fairways.