Here you can learn all about disc golf at Base Camp Adventure Lodge in Moab, Utah (often shortened to just "Base Camp Adventure" though another business in Moab has that name). The course is remote and serene despite a landscape resembling what almost two million tourists travel to see each year in nearby Arches National Park.
Base Camp Adventure Lodge's disc golf course ranked #91 in the most recent World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 released annually by us here at UDisc. The rankings are based on millions of player ratings of over 16,000 disc golf courses worldwide on UDisc Courses, which is the most complete and regularly updated disc golf course directory in existence.
Read the whole post to get a full picture of Base Camp Adventure Lodge's course or jump to a section that interests you most in the navigation below.
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- Basics: Times in top 100, year established, designers, cost to play, & availability
- History of disc golf at Base Camp Adventure Lodge
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
Base Camp Adventure Disc Golf: Basic Info
- How many times has Base Camp Adventure Lodge's disc golf course made the annual World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 since the rankings were first released in 2020?
Year 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 Top 100? - When did Base Camp Adventure Lodge's disc golf course open?
The course opened in 2004 but has been under current ownership since 2007. - Who designed Base Camp Adventure Lodge's disc golf course?
The original layout, now called Hayduke, was designed by the late Jon Lyksett. There is now a second set of 18 holes called Hurrah designed by Utah disc golfer Doug Smith. - Is Base Camp Adventure Lodge's disc golf course free or pay-to-play?
Pay-to-play. See its UDisc Courses entry for pricing. Guests paying to stay at the lodge play free. - When is Base Camp Adventure Lodge's disc golf course available for public play?
Year-round. It is only closed for an annual big tournament on the second weekend in March that often books out in minutes.
History of Base Camp Adventure Disc Golf
Most days, Tom Higginson walks out his front door and starts a hike of at least three miles/five kilometers through red rock desert with his dog and a giant tortoise named Kobae. As they walk away from their home at Base Camp Adventure Lodge – a place with a variety of accomodation options for outdoor adventure seekers – they'll see landscapes similar to what millions of visitors flock to nearby national parks Arches and Canyonlands to lay eyes on and could encounter deer, bighorn sheep, and an array of other wildlife.
But Higginson said that decisions about where to go aren't made based on a destination's beauty or the chance to glimpse local megafauna. Instead, Kobae's stomach is their guide.
"He goes about a mile an hour [2 kilometers per hour] – he could do a little better if he didn't eat everything on both sides of the road," Higginson said. "And his selection process as to where to hike is made from about six inches [15 centimeters] off the ground. You come to an intersection, there's a nice Jeep road going off to the left, there's a game trail going to the right, but straight ahead is 200 feet [61 meters] of cactus and tamarisk? You can bet that's the way you're going."
Though Higginson showed an amused frustration with his shelled hiking companion's wayfinding, he's clearly much happier with the day-to-day life that allows him these meandering excursions than the one he was leading nearly 20 years ago before he bought 145 acres/59 hectares of remote desert near outdoor sports haven Moab, Utah. In that previous existence, he was based in San Diego, California, and constantly traveling for his work as an owner of indoor soccer facilities across the United States.
"I got tired of doing that, so I started looking around for a place out in the boonies," Higginson said.
The plan was to create an escape for his soccer facility managers, and Higginson eventually set his sights on the Four Corners region of the southwest, where the borders of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. When he found the site where he'd build Base Camp Adventure Lodge, it was an abandoned camel tour operations hub. It also had some strange, chain-filled contraptions scattered throughout it that Higginson didn't recognize.
"I didn't know a thing about disc golf when I bought it, except that there was a course here," Higginson said. "It was in pretty bad shape."
After years of zero maintenance and exposure to the region's extreme weather conditions, baskets and other course infrastructure weren't looking great. The previous owner had left the course's reputation in a similarly sorry condition. Higginson found that out when he called a local disc golf community leader to see if he'd be interested in using the course for events.
"I found this guy named Doug Smith, and I called him up and said, 'Do you wanna have tournaments here?' and he said, 'Screw that place – we're never going back there again,'" Higginson recounted.
He later discovered what caused the bad blood.
The story Higginson heard is that the previous owner had authorized a tournament on the property, but when disc golfers showed up, he said that if they wanted to camp on his land, too, they'd need to pay double the $1,000 or so he'd quoted them originally. They could avoid that increase, though, if they camped at a different location nearby – he'd even be willing to tell them a good spot he knew about. The players opted for off-site camping.
"He sent them over to the Wind Caves where they didn't allow camping at the time, and then he called the cops and told them there were a bunch of guys camping over at the Wind Caves," Higginson said. "And they all got $100 or $199 penalties."
Despite the cold welcome from nearby players, Higginson decided to keep and spruce up the course. Disc golfers began trickling in and spreading the word that the new owner was a very different breed from the old.
Today, Smith – the same person who told Higginson disc golfers would never return to the site – runs an annual tournament at Base Camp Adventure Lodge on the second weekend in March. It usually fills its 100+ spots in minutes – once as little as 88 seconds. Smith is also the designer of a second 18-hole loop on the property that gives disc golfers visiting Base Camp Adventure Lodge two courses to play.
While people paying to play the course are a very small source of Higginson's earnings each year (not least because he doesn't want to raise the price from the $5-per-round fee he started charging almost two decades ago), he said he thinks his lodge is probably "more famous for disc golf than any of the other stuff" he offers. And since he's had two 18-hole layouts available, plenty of people have booked stays based around disc golf.
"What would happen before is most people would just pull up on a Friday or Saturday, play a round – sometimes two, and drive back in to Moab," Higginson said. "When I built the second course, people started showing up, checking in on Friday and checking out on Sunday."
That means his disc golf-based business has gone from people paying a token fee, playing, and taking off to instead getting hundreds of dollars for multi-night accomodation bookings. It doesn't hurt that while disc golfers enjoy the courses, non-playing companions can hike, kayak or swim in the Colorado River, take out off-road vehicles called side-by-sides, or just relax in the peaceful scenery Base Camp Adventure Lodge offers.
Along with the bump in business and reputation disc golf has offered, Higginson said a big reason he maintains disc golf on his land is because he generally likes the people who play it.
"Good people – almost always," Higginson said. "People that'd give you the shirt off their back."
How Hard Is Base Camp Adventure Disc Golf?
Base Camp Adventure Lodge's course offers multiple 18-hole layouts, but only one of them is a Smart Layout that qualifies for difficulty ratings. This is how it stacks up:
| Layout Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating* | Scoring Average* |
| Main | Long | Technical | Challenging | 187 | +5 |
*Scoring average and par rating constantly adjust as more people score rounds with UDisc. These numbers reflect stats from the time of publication and may have changed slightly since then.
To see hole distances on other layouts, visit Base Camp Adventure's page in the UDisc Courses directory.
To learn more about what the categories for distance, technicality, overall difficulty, and par rating mean, check out these posts:
What's It Like to Play at Base Camp Adventure Disc Golf Course?
Base Camp Adventure Lodge is aptly named. Not only does its disc golf brochure warn of scorpions, floods, drop-offs, mountain lions, snakes, and more, but the roughly 15-mile/24-kilometer drive from the outskirts of Moab typically takes an hour of rough, sometimes precarious driving. The owner, Tom Higginson, said you need about six inches/15 centimetes of clearance on your car to make it out safely, and even people with appropriate vehicles sometimes get scared of the road conditions, park, and walk the rest of the way.
When Higginson spots people in trouble, he does his best to help them out, whether that means driving them back to their vehicles after they hike in or taking the wheel himself to get them over particularly treacherous patches of road.
"I probably have the world record fror driving the most cars 250 feet [76 meters]," Higginson said.
The trip is worth it, though. Once you make it to the course, you're in for what will almost certainly be one of the most scenic disc golf experiences of your life. In the scenery/views ratings available on UDisc, the course has a perfect 5 out of 5.
The course doesn't just live off its scenery, however. The design of both 18-hole loops use the terrain to its fullest and will have you throwing up into the property's higher elevations as well as going back down with shots over terrain that seems straight out of Disc Golf Valley (DGV fans, we're talking Coyote Valley here). You'll play to baskets on steep inclines, in the middle of boulder fields, shaded by elegant rock formations, and on small outcroppings where a missed putt could easily send your disc sailing over a cliff.
"There's one where you have to shoot across a chasm, one with a two or three or four hundred-foot [61, 91, or 122-meter] drop-off, and then there's one where you shoot from the top of the hill to what's called the catcher's mitt – it's two rocks attached to each other just like a catcher's mitt," Higginson said, describing some of the holes people tell him are most memorable.
Difficulty-wise, the short and long layouts of both 18-hole options are designed for somewhat to very experienced players. However, Higginson reported that he's heard of only one downside for those who enjoy their first rounds at his course.
"They get spoiled thinking all disc golf courses are like this," Higginson said.
Along with driving an appropriate car out there, Higginson said you need to have bottles to carry plenty of water as you're only able to fill up near the beginning of any round. You should also buy any food you might want in town before you start the drive in. Sturdy footware and fitness for some real hiking are called for, too, as the layout with the fewest ups and downs still has the equivalent of 15 floors of elevation difference.
Finally, you'll want to bring discs you won't mind dinging up as the hard, rocky terrain is certain to take a toll on them.
But for all the challenges the course presents, its positive aspects seem to more than make up for them to almost everyone who plays it.
"Sometimes you look up on the hill, and you see people running from hole to hole they're so excited," Higginson said.
Three Real Five Star Reviews of Base Camp Adventure Disc Golf Course
Three real reviews of Base Camp Adventure Lodge's course from disc golfers on UDisc:
