Central Arkansas golfers do not think of themselves as playing at altitude, and correctly so. Little Rock sits a few hundred feet above sea level, which is close enough to neutral that no adjustment is worth making. Then people drive up into the Boston Mountains or over toward Fayetteville for a couple of days and find every club going slightly further than expected.
The Working Number
The convention used in most launch monitor software is roughly two percent additional carry per thousand feet of elevation. It is a simplification, but it is a good enough one for planning a weekend.
Going from 340 feet to 1,450 feet is about 1,100 feet of gain, so call it a two percent increase in carry across the board. On a 165 yard club that is a little over three yards. On a driver carrying 250 it is five. Neither is dramatic on its own.
Which Clubs Notice
The effect scales with flight time, so it is largest on the clubs that spend longest in the air. A driver and a long iron feel it clearly. A pitching wedge barely does. That means elevation does not shift your ladder uniformly, it slightly stretches the top of it while leaving the bottom alone.
Practically, that stretch is small enough not to require any equipment change for a weekend. It is worth knowing about because it is the opposite of what happens in cold weather, where the longer clubs also lose more than the short ones.
Elevation Change Within a Round
The bigger effect on Ozark courses is not the base elevation, it is the terrain. Downhill par threes off a shelf, uphill approaches into a hillside green, and tee shots dropping sixty feet are routine up there and unusual around Little Rock.
The rough convention is a yard of effective distance for every three feet of vertical change, adjusted for how steeply the ball is arriving. A shot playing forty feet downhill is roughly thirteen yards shorter than the flat number. Combine that with a two percent elevation gain and a warm afternoon and you can easily be two clubs different from what the yardage plate says.
What to Do Before You Go
- Add two percent to your carry numbers for the base elevation and leave it at that.
- Pay much more attention to the vertical change on each shot than to the base elevation.
- Expect the top of the bag to stretch slightly and the wedges to stay roughly where they are.
- If you play there often, ask us to run a second column on your ledger for the elevation you usually play at.
The Reverse Trip
Golfers who live up in the hills and come down to play in Little Rock have the same problem in reverse, and it catches them out more, because coming up short is punished harder than flying the green on most of our courses. If you moved here from higher ground and your yardages have felt long ever since, that is not your imagination.