Blue Lake Regional Park has a lot of wonderful things going for it. First off, the course has an incredibly professional feel from start to finish. This aesthetic includes spacious well-constructed tee pads, descriptive, useful tee signs, nice benches, a gorgeous course map on hole one, and impeccably maintained baskets. The course even has a nice sense of graphic design that incorporates the tee signs, course map and cute warning signs below every tee, that remind people to "not play with groups larger than 5" and to "not make too much noise for the neighbors." While these touches aren't a huge part of what makes a course great for me personally, I think they speak to part of the overall mission of Blue Lake, which, at the time of construction, was to help usher in the World Championships to the Portland Metro Area, and to provide an example of a true Championship caliber test for the top professionals in the world that could compliment the 36 holes at Milo McIver Park. To that end, Blue Lake has been a wild success. In the past 6 years, Blue Lake has matured into a very neat, well-groomed par 69, with well defined fairways, crisp and tight OB lines, and really no parts of the course that stand out as needing additional maintenance or work. This is a testament to the active engagement of the local club (Stumptown DG) that put the course in, and the hard work of the many locals that manage the course.
As for the actual holes themselves, Blue Lake has a very high degree of strategy and course planning built in to the design. Unlike most courses where most holes are par 3, and your only real choices might be between 2, maybe 3 lines to attack the pin, Blue lake has nearly a dozen holes where there are different landing areas, risk-reward challenges around the myriad of OB zones, and a variety of ways of getting to the pin. I also like the fact that, unlike a lot of longer courses, where many of the par fours and fives all sort of feel similar, Blue Lake does a great job of really creating a unique experience with each hole, with par fours and fives that have distinct segments, each with different challenges.
I like the style of the front nine, with the first two holes being a pretty nice open warm-up, a big challenge on three, followed by the two easiest par threes on holes four and six, with a tough par four sandwiched in between on hole five. Then hole seven, which at 950 feet is actually one of the easier holes to par, as a par five, finishing out the front nine with an attack-able par three and four. The back nine has many great holes as well, but they start to get a bit redundant with almost every hole being a brutally difficult par four or five. I think the course would benefit a lot by having one or two shorter holes in the final eight.
Lastly, I'll say that one of the things that stands out about Blue Lake is the fact that not a single hole on the course feels "wasted" - there are no filler holes, put in simply to connect other holes, or squeeze around some recreational area (other commentators have pointed out the delight that the disc golf course is a truly dedicated zone). Even though I don't personally like a few of the holes, especially in the final six, none of them feel like afterthoughts, which is really rare, even among high-level courses.