Ice Update

After our 4th blizzard of the winter cleared out on Tuesday, leaving behind it a beautiful sunny day (with a balmy daytime high of -7) I decided to go out and dig some snow pits on 16 green behind the shop to see how the ice was looking underneath.  As I expected, it doesn't look good....

Kind of hard to see, but that ice is close to 1/2" thick.

I dug 7 different pits in the snow on 16 green, and every spot I dug had ice underneath.  Ouch.

For whatever reason, 16 green seems to have the most ice on it.  I was out cross country skiing last week, and dug some holes in 9, 17, and 1 greens and only found very sporadic ice coverage at best.  Whatever damage those greens see will likely be very random and hopefully pretty minor.  Greens like 16, that seem to be close to 100% covered in ice, are the ones that are of the most concern.

The ice formed on January 10th, so at this point the turf has been encased for about 40 days, which is just starting to put the Poa in the danger zone, the bentgrass will without a doubt be just fine.  It would still be nice if we could get a little warm spell here in the next few weeks so Andy and I could at least get the ice cleared off of 16 green.

I chipped a few turf samples from under the ice on 16
green and put them in our "greenhouse" in one of the
south facing windows in the shop.  We will find out
in a few days what is alive after 40 days under ice.