What Happened to Spring?

Just last week, we were having a great early start to the golf season.  Quite a few members made it out to enjoy the weather and the golf, and it was great to see all the familiar faces that I haven't seen in a few months.  Now I'm afraid it may be a little while before I see you all again, the 10-day forecast doesn't look promising.  So far this week, the sun has been scarce and it's been raining off and on, hopefully this rain doesn't turn into the dreaded white stuff.  We have been lucky with the rain though, some other places in the Chicago area have had much more rain than we have.  Over the course of the past few days, we've received about 0.9" of rain, and other places have gotten well over two inches.  In the summer time we can usually soak up this amount of rain, but with the cold cloudy days, the golf course has gotten very wet and saturated. 

This return to winter does have a silver lining for the grounds staff though.  It's allowing us to methodically chip away at our spring cleanup with a smaller staff as opposed to bringing more staff in and scrambling to keep up with mowing on top of the clean up effort.  After a few days of hard work, the sticks and branches that fall on the golf course have all been cleaned up.  Now it all needs to go through the chipper, a job that will be saved for a frosty morning when we can't get out on the golf course.  Cleaning out all the debris out of the bunkers and getting them raked is up next.

A winter's worth of sticks and branches.

For those of you who have made it out to play, you may have noticed the "new" bridge on the right side of the 16th hole.  The week of the golf course opening, all the wood that made up the bridge was replaced because the old wood was rotting and quickly becoming a safety issue.  A new rubber mat to provide traction for walkers will be added to the bridge soon.

The remains of the old bridge alongside the new frame.



The new decking.