Grade: B+; Cost: $40; Slope: 138/126 -blues Ydg: 6900
This is your basic "neighborhood golf-course" on acid.
It's big. It sprawls over the countryside. It has a lot of trees! (this is a big deal in the high desert of southern Utah) Course actually has running water and there are holes with creeks on both sides of the fairway. The front is decently vertical and legitimately scary to play in parts, the back is a little more chill but still has a lot of up and down to it.
This is really an excellent golf-course as far as Slope 130 courses go.
Especially for a high-desert course, definitely a "win" to play this course.
And in terms of housing it has a trade-off. It does have a lot of houses but MOST of them are a decent distance back from the course. You will rarely see the sort of "driving down the cart-path, course to the left, a row of front-yards to the right" that is the point of no-return on so many other neighborhood golf-courses. So it basically is a course that you can play without worrying too much about hitting into someones' backyard.
I say "mostly". There are definitely places on this course where it is quite possible to hit into someones' backyard. Especially from 200 yards out with a 3-wood.
And for $40 for 18 with a cart and another $10 for a bag of bottle-cap beers, this is really hard to beat.
Even in 100 deg summer weather.
Because this is not the best public course in St. George.
It's good but not that good.
But not only is it a great value but it's also a great round in and of itself.
But I say again. As usual.
Play it during the week when it's relatively empty and you'll enjoy it a lot more.
Photography notes:
The shots taken here were almost all 25mm effective (normal), with or without the 2x digital zoom. I also took a lot of them in a casual manner, either quick or not holding the camera steady, because it was a necessary function that I was trying to dispense with quickly and get back to focusing on the course. I didn't have anyone blocking me so I kinda just hustled around playing and taking just enough shots to document the course well. And this is not a course which fails to hold a players' attention.
So the photography suffered a bit. A LOT OF FINE -DETAIL out there to shot, really. But the use of 2x results in an obvious IQ hit, so while it is tempting to use, it doesn't really work all that well in practice, it's just "servicable". So I thought that I'd try to just crop some of the normal shots and the rest was history. Cropping them down a full 2x (from 8k to 2k MP) is a bit too much, a few times too many, but roughly a 1.5x crop should work fine most of the time. But the main problem is that 25mm is just too wide for most outdoor landscape work. I almost never use the 15mm wide-angle mode, maybe 1 in 100 shots. It really needs at least an honest 50mm effective. I'd probably use that on most shots with maybe 1 out of 5 in 25mm effective.
I've been reading-up on the 8a online and it seems that either the HDR mode has been dialed back in terms of the haze filter or the tester doesn't know how to enable HDR mode, or that they should enable it. All the 8a shots that I've seen so far look like what I'd expect out of a DSLR of the same scene. It's like Google has gotten feedback that there's a little too much PP in the 6a :)
I think that it all depends on whether you like haze or not :)