Getting Close To Opening

With temperatures well into the 50s and 60s the last few days, it finally feels like spring has arrived.  The course is getting close to being completely melted off, although there are still a few large remaining drifts on some north facing green banks, and along the west side of the course where the wind blows all the snow in from the field (12 tee still has about 2 feet of snow on it.)

Still some good piles of snow on the upper holes, and lots of water to go away also....

Regardless, everything is looking on track on this point to be a solid start to the year.  The coulee in the course is running hard, and the Red is coming up quick, but at this point the initial forecast is for a crest of about 35' by the end of this coming weekend.  A flood level of 35' barely gets onto the edges of 17 and 9 fairway, but it shouldn't be a problem at all as fast as its supposed to go down.  What we don't need are any large rainstorms in the next 10 days.

View of Cole Creek from the 1/10 bridge.

As of this afternoon, the Red is still pretty iced up, but it should break
free and start moving here in the next few days.

Most importantly, after a fairly thorough examination of the turf on the course today, my suspicions were confirmed:  everything looks pretty good.  There are going to be some isolated areas in the collars on the back of a few greens that might be a little slow to recover.  These are areas that despite our best effort to snowfence, the strong winds over the winter stripped most of the snow off and the turf was left exposed to -33 degree temperatures.  However, these areas will be very small, the rest of the greens, tees, collars, and fairways all look to have missed any major damage.

I am keeping my fingers crossed that we are primed to have a GREAT opening of the golf course this spring.  If the forecast stays dry and the temperatures at least close to normal, then we might be on track to open by the weekend of April 19th, hopefully the range can be open at some point next week as long as the river stays off the lower part of it.  Todd and I will be sure to keep you all up to date as next week arrives.

Fairways look almost perfect, just a few very minor areas of snow mold.

This is an extreme close up view of a collar.  The Poa all looks quite dead
initially, but as you can tell there is plenty of life showing up in there.