The Thaw

Although the course is beautiful when covered in frost, I would be fine never seeing it in that condition.  But, here in the great PNW, we get some frost, and occasionally (like every decade), we get a good deep freeze.  Check out the weather details for the last 13 days.

You can see under "Rec. Year", we set four records for low temperatures.  That's pretty interesting but check out the records for 2009 in that same column.  That year we set 7 records in the first half of December with 4 straight days in the single digits.  Now that was a cold stretch of weather and I'll never forget it because we, like everyone else, had some pretty sad looking Poa greens that winter.  Well I think it's safe to say that we are coming out of today's deep freeze in a lot better shape.  Here's how we looked Wednesday when we finally had a moment where we got above freezing and the frost broke off.

The turf looks really good.  We will have to see how it looks after completely thawed out but I'm pretty confident we are going to have only a couple areas where the turf checked out, and that will be on our shadiest, weakest greens.  So anyway, it's going to be good to get back to work on the course.  The indoor work is getting old and the crew is getting cabin fever.  It was a productive stretch though as we almost got all the busy work finished.

The yardage plaques and tee markers look awesome.  Check out the black markers, you can actually see your reflection in them.

The new Ipe wood bunker rakes are simply beautiful.

The O.B. posts look like new.

The reorganized chem shed will be much more efficient with the additional shelving.

Now that the ground is starting to thaw, we can work on things that are on or under ground.  The steps on 10 tee are getting an overhaul.

So when are we going to thaw out enough to play the greens?  Well I don't have a crystal ball so I'll just say we plan on playing them tomorrow for the snowball open.  My hope is that they are thawed out below the roots so that we don't get a lot of root shear with the traffic on them.  They are Poa greens and our roots this time of year are pretty shallow so we really shouldn't have any long term damage by playing them when they are still frozen below the root zone or about 2 inches below the surface.  But one thing is for sure, they will still be frozen tomorrow in areas, and they won't putt great because I wont be doing anything to them like mowing or rolling.  That would just put unnecessary traffic on them.  We will wait till they are completely thawed out for that.   But it will be a nice day for golf tomorrow and so it'll just be nice to get out there and enjoy a day on the links.  Check out the course conditions video I made out here on Wednesday.

Now check out the video I made today as we started to finally thaw out.