Here you can learn about the Carnivore Valley course at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm in Glen Rose, Texas. A little over an hour's drive southwest of disc golf hot spot Dallas/Fort Worth, the highly-rated course has big shots, ponds, curious cows, and offers an escape from the crowds who frequent the tracks closer to the metro area that has a population of around eight million.
Dino Hills also has a second, 4.8/5-rated 18-hole course (Pterodactyl Ridge), a putting course (MicroRaptor), and a camping area that make it a great destination for a disc golf weekend.
Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm is ranked #74 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 Carnivore Valley 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 Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm: Basic Info
- When did Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm open?
2021 - How many times has Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm made the annual World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 since the rankings were first released in 2020?
Year 20202021 2022 2023 2024 2025 Top 100? Years when the course wasn't eligible to make the top 100 rankings are crossed out.
- Who designed Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm?
JB Rappold - Is Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm free or pay-to-play?
Pay-to-play. See its UDisc Courses entry for pricing. - When is Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm available for public play?
Year-round. It is only closed to the public during tournaments.
History of Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm
Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm was born out of the explosions in both entrepreneurship and disc golf brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world in 2020. When Brandon Martin's job at a gym disappeared as a result of precautionary shutdowns, he had to reconsider how to make a living. The lightbulb moment came when he talked to some pals whose small business was doing great.
"My best friends own a disc golf shop called Ideal Discs, which is in Fort Worth, and they said business was booming," Martin recalled. "So I went and bought a chainsaw. On the land I inherited from my family, I started cutting until it was playable."
The thing he was carving out was a disc golf course, and though his decision sounds impulsive, the desire wasn't entirely out of the blue. He had played the sport for around 20 years, so he loved the game and had seen enough courses to have a sense for what made a good one. Major landscaping projects, however, were something new.
"I'd never touched a chainsaw before I started doing this, so I was just going on a whim," Martin admitted.
Still, with no other great prospects for income and plenty of time on his hands, Martin dove in wholeheartedly, bringing in his friend JB Rappold to plan the layout.
The land Martin had inherited was a large area of mixed fields and woods he was making a little bit of money from by renting it out to cattle farmers as pasture for their herds. It had a few ponds, creeks, and plenty of elevation changes thanks to its location in the scenic rolling hills of northern Texas southwest of Fort Worth. He figured if the first course design turned out worse than he hoped, the setting would be pretty enough to make up for it.
"I told myself, 'Whether the course ends up sucking or not, we're gonna have a good time looking around,'" Martin said.
Martin's primary goal was to create something players couldn't experience at the many, many courses available in and near Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW).
"In DFW you've got 60, 70, maybe even over 100 courses now, and there's some tough ones, but none of them are really too long," Martin explained.
It would take between an hour and an hour and a half for most DFW disc golfers to reach his land. Martin hoped a mixture of length, aesthetic appeal, and a feeling of escape from busy courses would create a destination worth the trip.
It took Martin eight months to build the course using just a chainsaw, a – yes – push mower, and a go-cart. He opened to the public with Carnivore Valley and a putting course called MicroRaptor. The short course was meant to give players a break from the big Carnivore Valley throws between rounds, helping the experience feel a bit more rounded than just a round or two on the same track.
The two courses opened under the umbrella of Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm. The name is a nod to the nearby Dinosaur Valley State Park where visitors can see fossilized dinosaur footprints along the Paluxy River. Though Martin doesn't get the same traffic on his land that free courses in DFW do, business has been brisk enough for Dino Hills to stay his main source of income.
"DFW being only an hour away and my buddies owning a disc golf shop right there that have been there since 2015 to advertise for me has been my livelihood," Martin said.
Two years after Dino Hills opened, Martin added a new 18-hole course, Pterodactyl Ridge, to expand his property's offerings even further. It's designed to be even tougher than Carnivore Valley and play as what Martin called a "par disc golf course," meaning that playing par on a hole takes the same power and skill as achieving birdies at most disc golf courses created for skilled players. Pterodactyl has allowed him to host larger tournaments and also made his spot more attractive for overnight stays, for which he offers campsites.
Martin believes Dino Hills has worked and grown largely due to his willingness to listen to his customers about what he could do to improve their experience.
"I've gotten very good feedback, and it's off of the everyday disc golfer," Martin said. "That's why I am where I am today. It's because of their reviews and their word-of-mouth – just everything regular disc golf dudes are saying."
How Hard Is Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm?
Carnivore Valley has one layout designed for experienced, skilled disc golfers. This is how it stacks up:
| Layout Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating* | Scoring Average* |
| Carnivore Valley | Long | Technical | Challenging | 219 | +11 |
*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 and more for this layout, visit Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm'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 Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm?
Carnivore Valley was created with the goal of giving Dallas/Fort Worth-area disc golfers a course where they could really test their distance game – something they rarely get to do at the park courses in the densely-populated metro area. Though there are a few tight lines to be found, most fairways have plenty of open space with just enough scattered trees and brush-filled rough to force shot shaping.
Being on the edge of the region Texans call Hill Country, the course has elevation changes you won't find to the northeast.
"I knew that the property had potential to be cooler than any course in our area just because of the elevation – because there's not elevation in Dallas/Fort Worth," owner Brandon Martin said.
Along with a big arm and an ability to control nose angles on hills, disc golfers might want to bring a few discs they wouldn't mind losing for a while as a number of holes include water carries over ponds. Know, though, that discs that end up in the drink tend to find their way back home as Martin pays a diver to go into the ponds to retrieve discs, and the Dino Hills proprietor personally gets in touch with anyone who's put contact information on their plastic.
"My number one rule here is 'If you didn't buy it, don't take it," Martin said. "So if you find a disc on the course, turn it back in at the pro shop. I do really good about getting those discs back."
As we've mentioned elsewhere, Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm is home to two other courses, too. Pterodactyl Ridge is longer, more difficult, and has even more elevation than Carnivore Valley, and MicroRaptor is a putting course meant for quick fun on tricky, extremely short-range holes. Other extras include disc golf cornhole and disc golf tic-tac-toe, which is nine baskets made into a tic-tac-toe grid that players putt into hoping to make a line of three before their opponent can interrupt it.
Martin says he loves the reactions he gets from disc golfers who show up for the first time and realize everything his property has to offer them.
"My favorite thing when someone shows up here is how excited they are," Martin said. "It always overwhelms me and surprises me."
If you'd like a full overview of Carnivore Valley, you can see some top professional players take it on in one of the popular skins match YouTube videos from Go Throw (formerly GK Pro).
Three Real Five Star Reviews of Carnivore Valley at Dino Hills Disc Golf Farm
Three real reviews of Carnivore Valley from disc golfers on UDisc:
