Most Saturdays at Tuthill Park follow the same rhythm. A dog walker loops the lower trail while a retriever splashes through the creek crossing. A disc golfer lines up the downhill shot on hole six, the one that drops toward the Big Sioux River Valley. Someone photographs whatever is still blooming in the formal garden near the old farmhouse. It is the kind of place where nothing much needs to be scheduled.
Then, on one particular Saturday each fall, none of that holds. The upper parking lot fills before nine in the morning. Cars spill down toward the lower lot near hole nine. Coolers and folding chairs appear along the fairways. Anyone who assumes this is about the leaves changing is missing the actual mechanism. It has almost nothing to do with foliage and everything to do with a disc golf tournament calendar that has run at Tuthill, in some form, every fall since at least 2020.
The Course That Keeps Getting Booked
Tuthill's 18-hole disc golf course is not a casual afterthought tucked into a corner of the park. It is ranked sixth in South Dakota for 2026 by UDisc's course rankings, a slight step down from fourth in both 2025 and 2024, yet it still carries an average rating of 4.3 out of 5 across more than 1,700 community reviews. Course reviewers describe it as the layout South Dakota often chooses for its state championships, with a reputation built hole by hole: pines and hardwoods on the first three holes, narrow fairways on four and five, that long downhill drive into the river valley on six, tight short game on seven and eight, then wide-open distance holes nine through fifteen before a technical, tree-lined finish on sixteen through eighteen.
The Big Sioux Disc Golf Club runs the marquee summer event here, the Sioux Falls Open, which landed on June 27 this year as a PDGA B-tier tournament. But summer is not the only fixture on the schedule. Local organizer Josh Battazzi ran a tournament branded the Fall Classic at TutHill on October 11, 2020, October 9, 2021, October 23, 2022, and October 7, 2023, four straight years of the same weekend drawing card groups back to the course after the summer crowd thinned out. In 2025 a fall event returned under a new name, the Fall'N Down Tuthill Disc Golf Challenge, on October 4. If that same window holds again this year, an early October weekend will bring another crush of cars and card groups back to the upper course, whether or not the maples have turned yet.
On those weekends, the practical shifts are specific enough to plan around:
- The upper lot near hole one fills first, usually by mid-morning
- Overflow parking moves to the lower lot near hole nine, closer to the river
- Casual walkers who normally cut through the fairways tend to reroute toward the garden loop near the farmhouse
- Recreational disc golfers who want an uncrowded round go early, often before check-in even opens
None of this is posted on a sign at the entrance. It is the kind of knowledge that only comes from watching the same weekend repeat for six years.
Where the Regulars Go Instead
The disc golf course occupies the upper half of the park, but Tuthill's other draw runs along the river bluffs below it. The Falls Area Singletrack system includes close to three to four miles of machine-built trail through Tuthill, with packed dirt, stone hard-facing, and wood bridges that follow the natural grade of the bluff, averaging eight to ten percent with a maximum pitch of seventeen percent in a few stretches. It is accessible from the Sioux Falls bike path, with additional parking along East River Boulevard, which matters on tournament weekends when the main lots are already full.
Trail runners and mountain bikers who know the park treat the singletrack as the quieter option when the fairways are busy, since the two systems only cross paths near holes nine through fifteen, the stretch that runs closest to the river. The dog park sits apart from both, and regular visitors describe it in reviews as the largest in the city, a claim that holds up simply by comparing the size of its fenced acreage to anything else nearby. Tournament traffic rarely touches it. Dog owners keep their own schedule regardless of what is happening up the hill.
Summer brings one more layer that fall quietly retires: hot air balloon launches from the bottom of the park, next to tee nine, a tradition that traces back to Sioux Falls balloonist Ed Yost, who flew the first modern hot air balloon with an onboard heat source in 1960. By the time the Fall'N Down tournament rolls around, the balloons have mostly stopped, and the disc golf calendar takes over as the thing that actually organizes a Saturday here.
The Quiet Half of the Park
While the upper course fills with tournament traffic, the lower half of Tuthill holds a different kind of history, one that almost did not survive. The old Tuthill House, the farmhouse near the formal gardens, was built by the Howie family and later became the summer home of Arthur and Dot Tuthill, who purchased it in 1915 and called it Otonka Farm. In 1953 they donated the first 40 acres of the property to the city, and Tuthill Park officially opened on August 8, 1956. Part of their gift came with conditions: they wanted continued improvements to the grounds, no alcohol consumed in the park, and the delphiniums in Dot Tuthill's formal garden kept in place.
Decades later, the house itself nearly fell to demolition after years of disrepair. A group of residents, including Kathy English, organized a fundraising campaign to save it, and public testimony at the city council hearing ran heavily against tearing it down. Adam Nyhaug, a member of the Sioux Falls Board of Historic Preservation, described what the park looks like on an ordinary weekend, saying it fills with "kids and families and Frisbee golfers and walkers." English later recalled that once the effort reached the council, "we also had benefactors coming forward," and the house was spared.
That history is why the lower garden and farmhouse area still functions as the park's quieter counterweight. Weddings continue to book the grounds into fall, and the flower beds Dot Tuthill insisted on protecting are usually still holding some color well past Labor Day. Anyone who wants Tuthill without the tournament crowd tends to gravitate here, deliberately or not.
Reading the Calendar
None of this changes what Tuthill Park is on a normal week: a place to walk a dog, run a familiar loop, or throw a disc without much thought about who else is around. What changes is a handful of specific weekends a year, driven less by weather than by a tournament calendar that local disc golf organizers have kept running every fall since at least 2020. Knowing which Saturday that is, and which side of the park stays calm when it happens, is the difference between planning around the crowd and being surprised by it.
It is the kind of detail that only shows up after watching a neighborhood long enough to notice its actual patterns, not just its seasons. Danielle Konechne works and pays attention to Sioux Falls at that level, neighborhood by neighborhood, calendar quirk by calendar quirk. If you are weighing what a place like Tuthill Park would mean for your own next move, whether that is buying nearby, selling a home close to the park, or simply understanding what your property is worth in a neighborhood with this much local texture, her Get a Free Home Valuation tool is a fair place to start the conversation.
