On The Course January 15th

We ventured onto the course today to check the conditions after last weeks warm up and rain.  Temps reached to the 40 degree mark and according to our weather station we received around .2 inches of rain.   Unfortunately we lost a lot of the good 6 to 8 inch snow pack that we had but the good news is that there is still about 2 inches of snow remaining.  It seems like a lot of the snow that melted last week did make it into the drains,  but some did pool and freeze on the course mostly in the rough areas.

 All of the greens surfaces currently have snow cover.  They all look like the picture above which was taken in the middle low section of 16 green.  There is hard snow pack on top of the covers with a layer of frozen snow/slush on top of the covers directly.  All of this slushy ice was porous and broke up easily which is what we like to see.

This picture was taken from #10 approach.  You can see like on the greens covers there is some lite slushy crystallized snow.

 There are some fairways that have some ice build up like the above picture of #11.  The color change in the middle of the picture is the ice.  It is normal to see some of these low areas on fairways build ice during the freeze thaw cycles during the course of the winter. There were some other low spots like this one that also had some ice build up but most of them are small.

There are some parts of the course that have become a little exposed from the warm temps but they are mainly on high teeing areas and bunker banks.  This picture was taken on #7 Black tee.  Most of these areas normally lose the snow cover over the course of the winter due to the wind and melting.