Sunday, June 12, 2011

This week’s Golf & Tennis summary topic: Weather

Thank you all for your patience with Mother Nature. We have all been watching and waiting for warmer golfing conditions, which seems to be in full swing now. Don’t mind the golf puns.

With anticipation of a large runoff and the occurrence of unexpected erosion at the river bank’s edge of the Gros Ventre, we have noticed affected areas along holes 9 & 10. By the recommendation of brought in a construction company to put some large rocks, called rip-rap, in the river to divert the force of the river in strategic points to reduce and potentially eliminate any further erosion of the land. Let’s hope that the runoff doesn’t cause any more problems for the golf course.

Other upcoming projects are going to hit on bunkers, drainage and filling in the thin areas in the rough and fairways. Also, this year we are taking a new approach to our native in an effort to make playing out of it a possibility for missed shots. We will be cutting the native down to 4” during the wet part of the season and let it dry and grow out in the later part of the summer. This will be a three-fold benefit. Maintaining the native will hopefully reduce the vole (field mouse) habitat and will thin out the noxious weeds by maintaining a lower height of cut during their active growing months. Finally, the benefit for golfers will ultimately be more found golf balls. That means less penalty strokes on your score cards and speeds up the pace of play.

Get out there and enjoy the golf course!