David Jasper / The BulletinMap Guy bonks a putter off the top of the 14th hole's basket Friday at Hyzer Pines, the excellent 18-hole course in Sisters.

This will come as a surprise to no one, but not every outing can be more epic than the last. Sometimes you want to push yourself to your physical limits, other times you just want to huck plastic discs at metal baskets peppering the ponderosa forest.

Go the latter route and, yes, you’ll have less to post/brag about later on social media, but that’s probably a positive. Meandering slowly through the forest is at least 37 percent better for the soul than posting “like”-bait on Facebook.

At least that’s the way Map Guy and I were feeling when we set out to play disc golf at Hyzer Pines, an 18-hole course located off state Highway 242 in Sisters.

You were probably stuck indoors on Friday (as I am now), but let me tell you, that fair weather we enjoyed in September continued its extended run into October. It was as perfect a day as you’re likely to get in this neck of the woods, with a predicted high of 74 and a breeze that sent controlled-burn smoke wafting in more deserving directions.

Disc golf is exactly like golf, except you throw the disc at baskets instead of aiming for little holes, and there are no green fees or loud plaid requirements. I hadn’t played the game in more than a year, the last time at Pine Nursery’s nine-hole course in May 2012. From about 1999 to 2005, though, I was pretty serious about it, if sneaking in a round a few times a week counts as serious.

I didn’t compete, but I played a lot at Central Oregon Community College’s late, great nine-hole course and traveled to play courses in places like Eugene. And I felt the need to correct people whenever they called it “Frisbee golf,” or worse, “Frolf.”

Over the years, I’d built up a solid quiver of discs: ultra long-range drivers, putt and approach discs, etc. — pieces of plastic specifically designed for wherever you were in the course of the game.

I could par a hole here or there, but truthfully, all that plastic specificity amounted to was having variously sized and weighted discs to throw at trees. Yes, I aimed at baskets, but often what I accomplished was little more than another notch in the bark of those unfortunate enough to have been born, sometimes centuries earlier, in the future location of a disc golf course.

I figured my prolonged absence from the game had given area trees plenty of time to heal the scars of my mediocrity.

After meeting up on the north side of Bend, Map Guy and I carpooled to Sisters, headed through town and another mile or so west on state Highway 242 to Sisters High School. The first tee is down on the left side of the parking lot near the Sisters Park & Recreation District’s Community Building.

There, a large wooden archway of a sort reading “Hyzer Pines” marks the entrance to the course, with a map of the course, which we looked at, and instructions on how to play, which we ignored.

After I gave him designated discs for driving, putting and so on, Map Guy grasped at something to complain about, coming up with the fact that two of the three were yellow and one was blue, as though having color-coordinated discs is an important facet of the game.

Perhaps Map Guy can blame the discs’ color scheme for why he was two over par after the first hole (yes, they’re metal baskets, but like a lot of the other lingo in the game, disc golfers appropriated that term from regular golf). I managed to par the first two holes. Don’t worry, I told Map Guy, my game will tank. There’s little more satisfying than starting out strong, your throws banking around the trees just as you’d intended. Heck, the first few holes, I made one or two longish putts, each satisfying ring of chains like music to my smug ears.

What was even more smugness-inducing was when I’d find the disc I’d teed off with closer to the intended hole than Map Guy’s second throw. (It happened, really.)

But there’s little more frustrating than when it all goes south, like when your long drive goes through the wrong set of tree trunks. Or worse, banks so hard the wrong way you hope it will hit a tree to lessen the damage being done to your game.

Or worst, bonks directly into the nearest tree.

Fortunately, neither one of us had enough invested in disc golf to care about competing. By the fourth or fifth hole, we’d stopped counting, taking do-overs whenever we hit a tree we didn’t think we deserved to hit. On long putts, we’d keep trying with however many discs we had at our disposal until we made it in.

We made it all about fun, in other words, no one around caring enough to keep score.

We had the well-designed course, built in 2006, all to ourselves for the first third of the game, until we realized another group was closing in on us. They looked like high school kids, jogging from one hole to the next, an assumption we more or less confirmed when we heard a guy who had the look of a coach telling them to hustle. No one besides coaches uses that word, do they?

After finishing the front nine, we took a break and let the kids play through. There’s no clubhouse at which to grab a beer or grub after the turn, but there is a skatepark. I grabbed my skateboard, pads and helmet out of my car and took a few runs in the well-designed bowls of the adjacent Sisters Skatepark, also free to the public.

Twenty or so minutes later, we set out for the back nine. The 14th hole provided a sort of water hazard, a fenced-in pond that I’m sure has swallowed its share of discs.

The course is wooded and set up in an out-and-back manner, meaning you’re never too far a walk from the next tee or, for that matter, your vehicle. Some disc golf courses are hilly or rocky or have other terrain that can make them challenging to negotiate, but we never spent long searching for the next well-marked tee.

Occasionally, we did have difficulty seeing the basket down the fairway. When in doubt, we just threw in the general direction the rubber tees pointed. The 18th hole’s basket was not difficult to see from a distance, perched as it is atop a stump.

After the final rattling of the chains at that hole, the game was over. Starting off that morning, we hadn’t been sure if we’d play all 18 holes, but our game went by faster than we’d expected. No, we didn’t walk away with photos to plaster all over Facebook or Instagram, but we spent a chunk of a warm, sunny day outside, wandering through a forest and having conversation that ranged from trash talk to a whole lot of nothing.

And nothing, not even a dozen “likes,” can top that.

My discs probably won’t ride in my car everywhere I go as they used to, but I am going to keep them closer to the surface of the crowded shelves in my garage.

And while I’m not hooked on disc golf as I was a few years back, I look forward to putting more notches in tree bark soon.

— Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com