Abandoned Mini-Putt Course

Some time ago, I heard tell of an abandoned mini-putt course in a forest in my city of Hamilton, Ontario. As someone with a genuine love for exploring the abandoned and forgotten, I was extremely interested in tracking this place down, but wasn't able to find it on my own (I may love to explore, but I've never been all that good with maps).

For a while, I forgot about it: there were still a seemingly infinite amount of unexplored sections of the woods for me to wander, after all, and as far as I knew the golf course wasn't going anywhere.

Fast forward to an absolutely beautiful Saturday afternoon in June of this year. I decided to head down to the bike path I usually took to work and check out some of the trails that snaked off into the forest. I had ridden by these every day for the past few months, but had never taken the time to explore.

It honestly didn't seem like there would be much back there - the forest, from what I could tell, seemed pretty small and didn't go deep - but I didn't mind. This was, to me, uncharted territory, and that was all that mattered.

I grabbed a rental bike from the rack near my apartment and set off on the ~7 minute journey to the path. It's a very short walk from the bike path to the trails, so in almost no time I was out of the open and in the quiet shade of the forest.

And within minutes, I stumbled across it.

I was shocked, I was thrilled! This was it: the mini-putt course I had heard and subsequently forgotten about after my lack of navigational skills made it clear I would either need to be guided or, as it turned out to be the case, found it by accident.

Here's my journey in a series of photographs. (I'm not a professional photographer by any means, so I apologize for any lack of quality).

As you can see, some parts of the course are so overgrown that it's hard to tell it's there. I did some research on this place, and according to this article, it was added on to a bowling alley sometime in the late '80s or early '90s.

Unfortunately, just days after I found it, the forest was fenced off for construction on condos that will be replacing the long-closed bowling alley.

I'm glad I was able to finally track it down and check it out, just in the nick of time!