Saga of a Disc Golf Course Restructure - Part 6

When I last wrote about the ongoing saga of our course, and the moving/removing/ of holes, I was prepared to go into the environmental committee meeting to accept the final judgment on the course. I believe I wrote the last installment the day before the meeting, and fully intended on giving the play by play here on the site. Well, obviously, I didn’t write anything here, and the reason for that is that there simply was nothing to write. We went to the meeting, only about half of the committee members were in attendance, and of those that were there, the official word was that there was no official word. No decisions, or discussion of any kind, apparently, had been done regarding the disc golf course, and we were told to come back next month for more information. Not exactly worthy of a blog post, in my opinion. Things are heating up again though, as the next meeting is exactly one week from today, and when I checked my email, I saw that an article had come out regarding disc golf in Lynnwood, WA.

Lynnwood is the neighboring town to Mountlake Terrace, where Terrace Creek Park is located. It seems that Robin, not content with her discord at the city meetings, has taken her story to the local newspaper. The full article has yet to be released, but you can see the teaser article here. I’d run into Lowell last week and he told me that Robin had gone to the newspaper and that a reporter would be coming by the course to get our side of the story. Unfortunately, Lowell met with the reporter while I was at work, so I was unable to provide any input for the article.

The article pretty much sums up Robin’s stance in the first couple sentences:

The way Robin Lesher sees it, a popular sport is ruining this city’s largest park, hurting wildlife, trees and plants.

She wants the city to ban an 18-hole disc golf course from the 60-acre Terrace Creek Park, saying that the sport violates city environmental laws….
“They’re trampling the plants; they’ve killed some trees,” said Lesher.

As always, I’m doing my best to remain optimistic. The Enterprise visited Terrace Creek last summer and wrote a report where they got a lot of facts wrong (including a picture of some random guy that they said was me), so naturally, that makes me a bit nervous. Fortunately, it seems that this is a different reporter, and I’m hoping he has a better grasp of journalism. As a self-described treehugger, I can see the nerve that Robin is hammering on with her accusations. If I knew nothing about disc golf and read that people were trampling plants and killing trees, I would be against the game. The fact of the matter is though, that while we may wear a path with walking, we’re hardly “trampling” plants. Any plants that we are trampling are blackberries, which quite honestly, aren’t getting trampled enough. And we are certainly not killing trees–trees are our friends, they are what make the game interesting. There is a hole on the course where trees have been crudely chopped down, either with a machete or a hatchet, and that was not our doing. As I have mentioned in previous posts, there are kids that wander around the park at night getting drunk, and I imagine one night the teenage angst was too much for them and they decided to take it out on our trees. We kept our eyes out for the culprits but nothing ever came of it. For all I know, it could have been Robin out at night, trying to set us up.

In any case, the full article is due out in a few days, so only time will tell what kind of quotes we’ll see in the paper. I only hope that I don’t have to write a lengthy letter to the editor correcting all the false claims made against us.