CARLSBORG — Those helixes, hammers, grenades and scoobies — and other types of disc-golf tosses — could ruin Robin Hill Park, now a quiet haven for wildlife and horses, say some.
But Robin Hill belongs to the people of Clallam County. It’s a multi-use park that should offer activities to people of all ages and incomes, say others.
So goes the debate over the proposed disc golf course at Robin Hill, a 195-acre swath of forest, meadow and wetland a quarter-mile north of U.S. Highway 101.
Disc golf, aka flying disc golf, is a game in which players throw a flying disc into a basket instead of a hole, in an effort to finish the course with the fewest number of tosses.
It’s a popular sport, with 41 courses in Washington state.
Last year, Sequim Realtor E. Michael McAleer asked the Clallam County Parks Department about the chances of building an 18-hole disc golf course on the North Olympic Peninsula, since the closest full-size course is in Bremerton.
“I thought it would be really neat for the community,” McAleer said on Tuesday.
“I got the ball rolling, and the county ran with it.”
Actually he got the discs — and one could say the fur — flying.
“I was shocked,” at the negative reaction from a segment of Sequim’s population, he said.
When Clallam County’s parks and fair supervisor, Bruce Giddens, presented the disc course proposal at a public meeting last week, he and McAleer faced dozens of upset horsemen and -women.
This was a rambunctious bunch, Giddens said, though he declined to elaborate.
“There was almost a fist fight at one point,” said Kathy Petree, who often rides through Robin Hill on her Arabian, Moné.
She’d urged about 30 fellow members of the Olympic Peninsula Arabian Club to attend the meeting at the Sequim Prairie Grange Hall last Wednesday — and they showed up as a bloc.
“It was an ugly public meeting,” added Mike McAleer, father of Michael and a prominent real estate broker in Sequim.
The equestrians were “really loud . . . there was applause and booing; just a heap of emotion.”
