Bunker Hazards

A bunker is a hazard, right?  Unfortunately, we are not allowed to treat them as such in the golf course world in this country.  In Scotland and Australia, they actually leave bunkers as hazards.  But here in the good ol' USA, we treat them like royalty.

Hopefully most of you noticed that we managed to get all of the bunkers edged and cleaned up over the last two weeks.  All told, we have 47 bunkers on the course, averaging about 1,500 square feet a piece.  That means we have around 70,500 square feet of sand on the course, very similar to the total square footage of tee area that we have.

Even more frightening, those 47 bunkers total up to about 6,600 linear feet of edge where the sand meets the grass.  That means we have to maintain over a mile worth of bunker lips to keep them clean and keep the sand out of the grass, and the grass out of the sand!  This is a rather monumental task after the bunkers have been relatively neglected all spring while our crew was limited. 

The staff was out in full force last week pulling all the weeds and extra grass growing into the edges of the bunkers, trimming and edging the actual bunker lips, and then moving the sand around in the bunkers to get the depth a little more consistent throughout.  Basically that means all the sand that washed and settled down into the flat, bottom part of the bunker has to be pushed back up onto the face.

Lots of hard work was pulled off by our staff during their time spent on the beach in the last two weeks.  Unfortunately, we will probably repeat this process 3 or 4 more times this summer just to make sure you can have a nice lie in a beautifully manicured HAZARD.  Enjoy!

Bunker crew doing hazardous maintenance, apparently Ken thought
it would be necessary to put on his umbrella hard hat...

Pushing sand back up onto the face of the bunkers.