Yes, the rumors are true: You can now play nine holes of disc golf at Arapahoe Basin.

In early July, not long after wildflowers replaced lingering snow on The Legend’s slopes, a crew of five or six summer employees put finishing touches on the tee boxes, footpaths, fairways and baskets for six brand-new, never-before-seen disc golf holes at the oldest ski area in Summit County.

By the second week in July, all nine holes on the Par 3 course were open to the public with scorecards, maps and on-site directions from hole to hole. By the third week in July, rumors were spreading fast. The six new holes joined three holes built for the 2015 USA Pro Challenge — they were good, but not quite good enough to draw the disc-playing masses, officials said — and each one came with chief operating officer Alan Henceroth’s seal of approval.

“The wildflowers were in peak form,” Henceroth wrote in his blog, dubbed Al’s Blog, after a Sunday afternoon round on July 22. “Playing with the discs and baskets is definitely fun, but also just wandering in the woods with your friends is a really great way to spend a few hours.”

By the first day of August, at least three groups of players, plus dogs, were hiking along ski trails Sundance, Wrangler and portions of North Fork to play disc on an otherwise quiet Tuesday morning, proving to course architect Ben Morton that disc at the Basin was always meant to be.

“Colorado is beautiful in general, but there’s something about the Basin and being on the Continental Divide,” said Morton, who aside from designing the disc golf course is the ski area’s lift operations manager. “A lot of people know this place in the winter, but they don’t know it in the summer.”

Summery side of A-Basin

So, think you know A-Basin like the back of your hand? As Morton said, the new disc golf course puts that knowledge to the test, taking players on a 2-mile tour of slopes, gullies and fire roads on the east edge of the ski area — and it ain’t an easy one.

“Basin is known for being a little more on the black and extreme side of things,” Morton said. “We wanted the disc golf to be about the same.”

Like all disc golf courses in Summit County, including the other ski-area nine at Copper Mountain, A-Basin disc golf is free and open to foot traffic only. The holes weave in and out of the ski slopes, with some holes perched high on wide-open approaches, while others are buried behind thick stands of pines. Elevation changes are standard for mountain disc, Morton said, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have to hoof it past Lenawee Express — yet.

“At a ski area it’s hard to not go uphill,” Morton said. “It’s not very appealing to people and we can’t always run the lifts, so I knew we had to start down at the base. Hopefully Hole 9 will become Hole 18 in the future.

That’s right — Morton and crew are already devising a way to get nine additional holes built at A-Basin, giving the ski area a bona fide 18-hole course. It all comes down to timing: With major expansions like The Beavers and Steep Gullies taking up most of the staff’s off-season energy, an additional nine holes will have to wait.

“I like the challenge,” Morton said of playing disc at the Basin, or anywhere in the Rockies, for that matter. “You have good days you have bad days, you have days when you nail a shot and days when you don’t. Colorado has some of the best courses around.”

Now, A-Basin has a course to call it’s own.

Ready to play? The A-Basin disc golf course is open daily from 9 a.m. to dusk, weather and conditions permitting. The course typically opens for the summer when the slopes are dry (early July). Scorecards are available at the base area, with distances and basket locations at each tee box.