The Story Behind Minnesota's Disc Golf Mecca

EAST BETHEL, Minn. (WCCO) -- Way up in the north metro, you'll find Minnesota's mecca for disc golf, with two courses that rival any other in the country.

There's Blue Ribbon Pines in East Bethel, and, just a few miles down the road, there's Vision Quest in Oak Grove.

How the two course came to be so close to each other yet so far from everything else is quite the story.

Blue Ribbon Pines was first, opened in 2006, built on Ray Jordan's sprawling property, and in his woods.

"Our mission statement is to give disc golfers a beautiful place to play," Jordan said. "You know, just someplace they can come where they really feel like, gosh, this is nice. This is really nice."

Neighbor Mike Rivard, who was in the tree clearing business, helped him build it. Then he started disc golfing.

He liked it so much that he decided to build a course of his own just down the road. Vision Quest opened two years ago.

"We tried to build a really challenging course with a lot of unique features," Rivard said. "I like to do things a little differently than everybody else does."

Ordinarily, with most businesses, when you've got two companies that do the same thing, especially in a niche business and they're real close together, you'd think there'd be a little animosity.

"But we've been friends, way before all this started," Jordan said.

Rivard says that while there is a little rivalry between him and Jordan, they are good friends.

"We play on both courses, we critique both courses, we give each other a hard time, we come up with ideas for both courses," he said. "A little friendly competition is great in life, whether it's businesses, sports, or anything.

In fact, they see it as a plus -- double the reason to be a destination.

"They love the fact that they can come here, they can play two of the best courses in the country in the same day," Rivard said.

The product of two guys with a passion for their sport, and just enough craziness to try to pull it off.

"People talk about building courses all the time. People talk about doing a lot of things all the time in life, but there's only a handful of people that just go out there and actually do it and go all out about it," Rivard said. "Ray and I are a lot alike that way, we're both very creative, so we were able to kind of feed off each other. And, get a couple of kind of creative goofballs like us together brainstorming, a lot of good things kind of can come out of it."

What's driving me, is making a better course for the people," Jordan added. "And I play all the time, so it's, like, I want it."

Both courses are open year-round.