This past week my father has been hard at work turning his ten acre lawn into a boulder golf course (or, as I like to call it “permutation golf”.) The idea behind boulder golf is very simple. Instead of using holes in which the golf ball will drop you use large rocks and you just have to hit the rock. The game requires a greater degree of honesty as there is no hole to hold the golf ball and prove whether or not you successfully made the shot. For really good players able to hit the hole from some distance this could be a problem. It is not for us.
I prefer the term “permutation golf” as the real innovation is dad’s use of triple fairways from each “hole”. His ten acre course, two and a half miles in “length”, is created using only six boulders and flags. Each fairway begins at one of the boulders and ends at one of three possible ending boulders. Through a series of permutations you end up criss-crossing the course several times as you work through the mesh of starting point / target boulder combinations.
At this point dad is working almost exclusively with open grass which is all “rough”. The fairways themselves have not been made and he is not planning on working on that aspect of the course until next year after he is able to bring in a heavy-duty steam roller to smooth out the course. One of the holes has a little bit of a green created so far.
We look forward to being able to play permutation golf when at dad’s house in the future. If you play straight from hole to hole and do not hook or splice too badly, it requires approximately two and a half miles of walking to complete the course. There are no sandtraps yet, though.