Free disc golf since 1975 anchors this corner of Balboa Park, San Diego's favorite outdoor recreation grounds around you. Named for John Morley, a longtime parks commissioner who championed public recreation in the early twentieth century, this section of the park contains the Morley Field Disc Golf Course — one of the oldest disc golf courses in the United States, established in 1975, and still free to play — as well as public tennis courts, a swimming pool, a velodrome, a bocce ball facility, an archery range, and a lawn bowling club. Balboa Park's eastern sections were intentionally left more naturalistic and recreation-focused than the formal museum campus at the park's center, and Morley Field embodies that spirit.
The disc golf course winds through eucalyptus groves and canyon edges, with eighteen holes playable for free every day of the year. The eucalyptus trees themselves tell a story: planted throughout the park and across Southern California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as part of a misguided scheme to grow railroad ties, eucalyptus turned out to be useless for that purpose but established itself so thoroughly in California's landscape that it now feels native to a place where it has only existed for 150 years.