The back 9 is worth driving for. We saw Elk from nearly every tee box and you can get soft-serve ice cream across the street from the first tee box. The back 9 tucks behind the maintenance buildings and staff housing. The holes get to 400+ ft and they make them 4 par to keep your score down. Open-canapy pine forest with a couple nice topo features (hole 15 is particularly nice).

The front 9 is pretty weak. The holes are short and stack on top of each other. The course is surrounded by roads on most sides of most holes. A steady flow of traffic from all sides make this feel surprisingly urban for its surroundings. Massive parking lots, swarms of church groups, and giant buildings really suck the life out of the first half of this course.

Only worth the drive if you get a soft serve at the lodge and play the back 9 twice.

The surounding scenery is amazing. But, you don't play the surrounding scenery, you play in a YMCA commune on a subpar course which I will begin to outline in the CONS. There are nice new Discatchers in most instances (a few are the old style with only one outer band of chains). There are tee markers with distances but I think they are WAY off.

First off, the flow of this course is AWFUL. As mentioned, holes 1, 2, 11, 12 are gone. I saw baskets 2 and 11 and tee 12, but the rest of the hole is gone. Yes there was some construction, but if they would have put any effort into this course, they could have easily reinstalled the baskets very close to the remaining layout, and easily added a new tee (because the existing tees suck so bad, new ones couldn't possibly be worse). Anyway, when you finally start on #3 (if you can find it amongst the congested traffic and one way roads) you will find that as you wind around the course, after you finish 18 you'll be roughly 1/2 mile from the start (or further if you parked where we did due to no available parking). Second biggest con is that the tees SUCK. They are natural, short, EXTREMELY rutted, and very uneven. Most of the holes are relatively unimaginative and do not utilize the terrain to the fullest. There are a few on the back nine among a neat valley piece of terrain, but the hole is not designed the way a professional disc golfer would appreciate. What I mean is that there are sporadic trees blocking any type of controlled fairway shot. The holes are just random in my opinion with no thought put into throwing some specific tee shot to execute and navigate the fairway. And once again (as I've seen on many of my colorado courses) the baskets are simply plunked in odd locations like right behind a tree, or in a clump of bushes. These are no risky or rewarding greens, just oddly placed. What I liken it too is limited long term planning. No one wanted to build a long term championship or even high quality course here that would stand the test of time. As the trees and shrubs grow, there are holes here that will HAVE to be redesigned. I think that is idiotic. Once again, I believe disc golf here was just an afterthought, just some employees or camp patrons who got approval to put in a course - by amateurs. All of this is placed among the surroundings of lots of cars and pedestrians that make you wait to play your round as they leisurely make their way around the complex.

This one was the poorest overall of all the "sweet" mountain courses I had planned to play while in the Denver and Fort Collins areas. While Winter Park was much more rough and pretty horrible as far as BAD tees, unmowed fairways, ridiculous greens, non-creative use of the hill, and no signs, YMCA is a HORRIBLE course. This is not a disc golf course, this is simply tossing a disc on a poorly designed layout, among poorly designed holes, with no effort put into reconfigutring tees or baskets after construction, all within an overcrowded YMCA commune. For those of you vacationing, sure you'll get a chance to fling here at YMCA Estes, but PLEASE do not go out of your way to play here, true disc golf fanatics will be SORELY disappointed - I was!!! It just lacks solid and long lasting design. I bet every year it changes - it almost HAS to! This will NEVER be a destination kind of course for large groups of travelers.
UPDATE: This is better than other courses I have rated 2. Bumping up to 2.5