Have clubs, will travel: Whirlwind Nevada golf odyssey a trip to remember

Two days ... 782 miles ... five golf courses ... 51 holes.

Those are the key numbers from the golf journey my oldest son and I took halfway across Nevada on a lazy couple of days in May.

You might have noticed some of the small golf courses to the side of the freeway as you drive across I-80 on your way to California.

There's Toana Vista in Wendover, Chimney Rock in Wells, Jackpot Golf Club in Jackpot, Ruby View in Elko, Spring Creek in Spring Creek and Mountain View in Battle Mountain. All are within 300 miles of Salt Lake, closer than the golf courses in St. George that Utahns frequent, especially in the winter.

In these days of rising gas prices, which incredibly have gone up nearly a buck since we made the trip, you may not want to take the same adventure. But if you're heading across the desert anyway, it might be fun to stop and experience a couple of these small-town courses along the way.

If you go on a weekday, you're likely to get right on at any of the courses with little traffic in front of you. The price is right also, with greens fees ranging from $10 to $18 for nine holes walking and carts required only in the mornings at Toana Vista.

Spencer and I headed out on our journey on a Monday morning before 8 and pulled into Wells by 10:30. We saw two cars in the parking lot at Chimney Rock when we arrived. The course is named for an interesting rock formation that looks like — guess what — a chimney, in the mountains to the southwest.

The local town doctor was just about to tee off, but he said he wanted to play at a leisurely pace and allowed us to go first. Even walking, we were able to play the flat-as-a-pancake course with dead straight holes and railroad tracks on the west side in just an hour and 25 minutes.

Next we drove north up Highway 93 toward Jackpot, a town on the Idaho border with a name that explains itself. A few years earlier we had tried to play the same course during a school spring break after playing a course in Twin Falls the day before, only to awaken to a couple of inches of snow on the ground.

After the hour's drive and arriving just after lunchtime, Jackpot was much busier than Wells. However, we got on the first tee with little wait, and after a foursome waved us through at No. 2, we were cruising. We played the front nine in 90 minutes and toured the newer back nine in a cart, stopping to play a couple of open holes.

It would have been nice if there was a road going west out of Jackpot, but we had to head right back down the same two-lane road retracing the 67 miles back to Wells before going west on I-80 to Elko.