The F word

We still have a long way to go until spring in North Dakota, but our previously dry winter has taken a dramatic turn in the last few weeks, and unfortunately that means we have to start thinking about the possibility of a flood, albeit probably a small one.

While we still don't have a whole awful lot of snow on the ground in Grand Forks (probably about 12"-14" if you can find a non wind affected area), areas near Fargo and to the south have closer to 24"-30" on the ground, and that snow contains about 2"- 4" of water.  Of course our watershed is backwards since the Red River runs north, so the more snow down South at the beginning of our watershed, the more flow hits us at the worst time in the spring.

An updated snow depth map from February 14th.

I love maps, especially 3D ones.  This map gives an awesome demonstration of the Red River valley watershed and how
incredibly flat the terrain is.  The Red River falls at a rate of less than 1 foot per mile on its trek to Lake Winnipeg.

After doing some research on Wikipedia about this river, I realized that during my time in the golf business, I have now worked on and been responsible for water draining off my golf course and into the 3 different watersheds that make up North America.  During my time near Vail Colorado the golf course drained into the Colorado River watershed, which of course makes its way to the Pacific Ocean.  My time in Big Sky Montana was in a watershed that ended up in the Missouri River, which feeds the Mississippi River and then into the Atlantic Ocean.  And now, the water from the Grand Forks Country Club feeds into the Red River, to Lake Winnipeg, and eventually into the Hudson Bay, which is considered part of the Arctic Ocean.

There are still a lot of variables left to determine the fate of our flood season this spring.  Most notably of course is how much more snow we might get in the coming weeks, how fast the snow melts in the spring, and if that melt occurs early in the spring or late.  Another important factor working in our favor is the lingering drought from last summer, especially to the south, which left the ground dry last fall and able to soak up more moisture during the melt this spring.

Next week the Hydrologic Prediction Service will issue an updated flooding forecast for this spring.  As of our last prediction on January 21st, based on the conditional simulation we stood about a 12% chance of cresting over 35 feet.  Although flood stage begins at 28', I consider 35' the mark at which point the golf course really begins to be affected by the flooding.  I would expect that the forecast that comes out next week will raise that percentage a decent bit....

On the plus side, we are still in a drought, so the moisture is a good thing.  Unfortunately, this Valley has shown that there is a very fine line between too much water and not enough.  The summer of 2011 brought us a summer flood crest of 36' in the end of June, and by the end of the Fall only 3 months later we were already considered to be in the beginning of a our current drought.

One last note, Andy and I finally finished working on our tractor mounted slit seeder used for reseeding the course in the event of a large flood.  I am not sure of the exact year of this unit, but it was in pretty rough shape.  Both of the wheel axles were bent (I am assuming from someone seeding too close too a tree and hitting the trunk), bearings were worn out, and I wouldn't even want to guess of the last time the oil was changed in the gear housings.  And most significantly, the 170 steel blades that slice into the ground to make a bed for seed to drop into had worn down so far that even adjusted as low as the unit would go, didn't even make contact with the ground anymore.  Andy removed all 340 bolts by hand 2 weeks ago, Grand Forks Welding cut us out some new blades (for about 1/2 the price the manufacturer wanted to sell them to me for), and just the other day we put all the new blades on and got the seeder put back together.

It took about 5 hours to remount all 170 blades

Old blade, New blade.

Remounting the slicer disc back onto the seeder box.

Slowly Working Toward Golf Season

Maybe in another 2 months or so we will be considering the beginning of golf season?  The chances for any sort of a spring flood, even a minor one, look pretty slim at this point (fingers crossed, knock on wood) so I would like to hope we could consider playing some golf by the start of April.  Last year we were hitting balls on the driving range on March 17th in shorts while it was 70 degrees....albeit with the ground still frozen four feet deep.  I would like to imagine that a "normal" spring, if such a thing exists, would let us be out hitting golf balls by sometime in the beginning of April.

With still 8 or so weeks left to go until we will be working outside again, Andy and I are still staying plenty busy in the shop.  Although I will have to admit, we are getting a bit of cabin fever, starting to drive each other crazy, and possibly could be caught talking to ourselves if the other one is working on a different project.

We finished all the important work on our highly used pieces of equipment, such as all the reel grinding and sharpening, bearing replacement, and fluid servicing back a few weeks ago.  We have now moved on to giving some much needed attention to some of the older and less used, but still very important equipment that we have.  These pieces include the slit seeder we use for reseeding after a flood, transport trailers, light duty utility carts, topdressers, water pumps, etc.

We have also started to work on the course accessories:  tearing apart ball washers, sanding and restaining tee markers and yardage posts, and painting cups.  Next week we get the new metal frames for the new cedar trash can holders we are going to make back from the powder coater, so we will be tearing into that project very soon.

Disassembling ball washers.  A local outfit is going to strip all the old paint
and powder coat both the body and lid.  Brand new ball washers next year!

18 water pumps!  Some of them over 10 years old, rusted and seized, engine
blown, etc.  We went through each one, taking parts from the dead pumps to
get as many to run as possible.  We finished with 10 working pumps and junked
the rest.

We use our 14' tandem axle trailer often for hauling equipment and picking
up large loads of pipe, wood, retaining wall blocks, etc from town.  Last fall
while doing 50 mph a wheel bearing seized up on me.  Needless to say, we started
by replacing all the wheel bearings....

New wheel bearings, and most importantly our trailer now has fenders and
working brake lights and turn signals meaning that it is actually street legal!
No more worry of a ticket heading into town to get supplies.  New wood,
safety chains, and a fresh coat of paint make it look like a new trailer.

Yardage stakes with a fresh coat of paint and stain and loaded up ready to go
back out on the course first thing in the spring.   Allie had another day off from
preschool, so she got to help.

The blades on our tractor mounted slit seeder were so worn down that they
didn't even cut into the ground anymore.  The bolts are placed so that it is
impossible to get a power tool on them, so Andy had to remove all 170 blades
(340 bolts) with hand wrenches.  Next week he gets to put all the new blades
back on.....with hand wrenches.

Andy getting close to having all the blades removed, the
slit seeder on the tractor is in the background.

We had the parts breakdown book out while working
on the slit seeder.  Our "shop foreman" took some time
to go over some diagrams with Andy so he knew how
to reassemble it when he was finished.

We completely took apart and painted the small trailers that are used to transport
our walking greens mowers around the course.  I scored the trailers used
for an amazing deal last year from a guy in Florida, they were just a little
rusty and in bad need of some touching up.

Trailer put back together with a mower loaded onto it.

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....

It's Too Cold In California

Hope you Northerners get a kick out of this!  Apparently highs of 55 degrees are "beyond cold".  I think I saw a wind chill index of -40 in our forecast next week...

Worst Case Scenario

Everyone has a different idea of what their own "worst case scenario" would be.  For me, at least during the winter, it is very simple:  rain.  Doesn't sound too bad right?  Well, for my local readers that have seen how glazed over the roads are here right now, areas on our golf course are buried under that same layer of ice.

Starting the week we had a decent, albeit thin, layer of snow on the golf course, generally about 4 or 5 inches.  The snow was nice and soft all the way down onto a frozen turf surface.  Just the way I like it.  That all changed dramatically on Thursday when the high temperature skyrocketed into the 40s, melting some of that snow down into about an inch or two of slush.  And then, January in North Dakota threw a curve ball when it rained that evening.  All of the water from the half melted snow, plus the rain, instantly ran down onto the frozen turf surface with nowhere to drain, and when the temps dropped through the night back into the teens, ice formed instantly.

The greens are of course my biggest concern, although there will definitely be some low lying areas in some fairways that puddled some water and froze.  The greens however, with their high percentage of Poa Annua, struggle as it is to make it through a brutal winter here.  Add a layer of ice on top of the plants, and death is almost certain.  Ice essentially suffocates the turf.  Toxic gases, including ethylene and cyanide, are trapped under the ice, and worse yet, oxygen is not allowed to get down to the grass.

A general industry standard is that Poa can survive 30-50 days under ice, anything beyond that and plants are starting to die.  Bentgrass and kentucky bluegrass, much stronger plants, are usually safe for close to 100 days or more entrapped in ice.  Like with most stressful conditions, the Poa will die first.

Add on top of this our recent blizzard, which brought very little in the way of insulating snow (maybe only 2 or 3 inches stripped and drifted by 50 mph winds) and instead is providing our now naked or ice buried turf with some lovely -30 windchills.  We started off this winter pretty well with some good snowcover, but our likelihood of having a quick spring green up just took a jump off a cliff in the last few days.

Our only hope at this point is that we will catch a decent warm spell (a few days in the 40s) sometime by the middle of February so that Andy and I can have a chance to go out and physically remove some of the ice from the greens as it melts and softens just a little bit.  Brutal work to say the least, but that is the only chance those ice buried areas will have for survival.  If it stays cold and frozen all the way through mid March however, which is probably the norm, things are going to be pretty ugly....

We started the week with the course looking like this.  Perfect.

Ice on 18 green.  The water literally froze in sheets as it tried to slowly drain
off the green as the temperature dropped rapidly that night.

A 25 year old settled irrigation trench on 9 tee is now a death trap for this poor grass....

4 Months To Get Everything Fixed

I generally consider the period from December 1 - April 1 our annual 4 month "vacation" away from the golf course.... and into the confines of the shop.  With the soil frozen already a foot deep out on the course, and at least a decent blanket of snow on the ground, Andy and I have begun our annual pilgrimage into the heart and soul of each piece of equipment in our fleet.

While most golf courses would employ at least a part time, if not a full time mechanic, we unfortunately do  not have one here due to budget constraints.  With that, Andy and I do our best during the golf season to keep the equipment serviced, fixed, running, and sharp, but there is really only such much we can get done since the turf on the golf course is our primary focus during the summer months.  During the winter months however, we dig deep into each piece of equipment to try and make sure that it is as best prepared as possible for the coming summer.

We start with the basics on each piece:  engine oil and filter change, suspension, steering, and driveline lubrication, clean or change air filters, clean or change spark plugs, change fuel filters, change hydraulic filters, check hydraulic hoses and replace damaged ones, and check and top off any other fluids (transmission, differential, hydraulics, radiator, etc.)

Next we start a more detailed diagnosis of each piece by:  fixing any leaks, tightening bolts, repairing or replacing tires, checking or changing belts, replacing burned out headlights, tightening cables, etc, etc, etc.

Lastly, at least on the mowing equipment, we dive into the reel cutting units.  All cutting reels and associated rollers utilize ball bearings in all of their rotating parts.  These bearings take a serious beating over the course of a few growing seasons.  To put it into perspective (based on some rudimentary numbers that I just crunched) a reel on one of our fairway mowers will make 290,400,000 revolutions during a single growing season.  The bearings inside the reel housing take the full force of each one of those revolutions.  After a few years and a couple of billion rotations, the tight tolerances of the small balls inside of the bearings start to wear down and develop a little bit of play. It doesn't take much wear to produce a few tenths of thousandths of an inch of play, which will produce unacceptable variations in cut quality when we are talking about mowing grass at about 1/10" on a putting green.  Every reel and roller will have all of their bearings checked, bad ones will be replaced, and then the reel and bedknife will be sharpened, setup, and reinstalled on the mower ready to start cutting grass first thing next spring.

Our first project was fixing the side chute for our material handler.  This piece
is 12 years old, and the steel hinge that holds on the swinging arm literally
broke right down the seam this fall and the entire thing fell off!

Next, the rear rake attachment on the sandpro (bunker rake).  Years of raking
bunkers and pushing piles of sand had bent the connection point to the machine.
I do enjoy welding and fabrication projects, so this one was right up my alley.

While we were working on the sandpro, we replaced the
worn down steel tines on the rake attachment.  This picture
is a pretty good illustration of how much sand can wear
down a piece of steel over just a few years.

Andy has all of the fairway mower reels loaded up and ready to go outside for
a thorough pressure wash.  Last winter we replaced all of the bearings in the
rear rollers, this winter we will be replacing front roller bearings, and most likely
next winter we will be putting on new cutting reels and replacing their bearings.

We've made a pretty good dent in the equipment repair process thus far actually.  My goal is to be done with all the equipment by the middle of January, at which point we will converting to a woodworking shop for the next month and half to restain tee markers and yardage stakes, and then start building our new course accessories for next summer.

Snow! Melt. Snow! Melt. Snow! Melt. Snow!

This has been the pattern for about the last 2 months.  We received our first good snow on October 4th this fall.  That of course melted, which I expected it to.  We then received another good snow on November 3rd, about 4 or 5 inches.  I halfway expected that one to stick around for the winter, but of course it melted about a week later also.  Finally, we received another 2" on Thanksgiving, and I was sure that it would stick with us for the rest of the winter.  But low and behold, the first week of December brought RAIN of all things to North Dakota, and that of course melted the snow.

Now another 2" of snow over the weekend, and of course behind it comes the 30mph north winds and the bitter cold.  Certainly a little snow is better than none at all, such a small amount accompanied by such strong wind still blows a lot of areas bare out on the course.  The snowfence is helping keep some of the snow on the greens, but there are still a lot of areas on the course that are uncovered right now.  Temperatures that barely grazed 0 yesterday, and then dipped to -9 last night are surely are starting to take a toll on some of the Poa in the exposed areas out there.

We really need to get that one good burying snow here soon....

That "feels like" temp of -23 is a brutal combination of cold
and wind on the exposed turf on the golf course.

Just a little over an inch of snow on 16 green provided a decent amount
of protection keeping the turf canopy closer to 11 degrees.