We're Having A Heat Wave!

Well, depends on who you ask.  It may feel warm if you live on the North Pole...

Well, the forecasted low was -22, so I guess we're doing pretty good.

While this isn't a completely out of the ordinary cold snap, the circumstances that are accompanying it aren't exactly the greatest.  We experienced our second blizzard in as many weekends, this one however brought very little new snow, just some insanely strong winds on Saturday.  The 3 inches of fresh snow that was so beautifully covering the golf course last week blew somewhere down into South Dakota with those 50 mph north winds.  Now again, our ice covered greens are left half uncovered, exposed directly to these temperatures.  

Friday afternoon brought a great calm before the storm.

So nice in fact that Andy and I took a little cross country tour of the course
to dig some holes on the greens and check the ice.

I managed to pull this ice layer off of an area where the snow was thick
enough last week that the rain didn't percolate all the way down to
the ground.  This is basically an exact example of what is on the greens.

After our weekend wind storm, we're back to this.....not good.

As you can see, the ice is very sporadic.  Some of it is
close to half an inch thick.

Our current cold spell isn't suppose to break anytime soon either.  The temperature dropped below 0 by about 5pm on Saturday.  At this point, we are not forecasted to break back into positive numbers until this coming Saturday sometime.  If that holds true, we will end up going close to a full week without seeing a temperature above 0!

Here in the next week or so I will be going out on the course with a hole saw on a drill to pull some samples off of a few of the greens with the worst ice.  Like last year, I will plant these samples in some cups of soil, water them, and put them in the south facing windowsill in my office to see if they are dead or alive.  At this point though, I am already pretty sure that almost everything that is either ice covered or has had the snow blow off of it and exposed to direct cold temperatures is headed for destruction.

Time to start looking at seed catalogs and working on "Plan B" for this spring....