Almost two weeks after the season’s first major snow, we are still working to clear the greens of snow and ice. A week after the storm, air temperatures rose to the 50’s for a few days and melted the snow to a slush which reformed to ‘glacier’ like ice when the temperatures fell back again.
Although the course is clear of snow or ice in a lot of areas, the winter’s bounty is stubbornly staying in just as many more.
Many of the greens didn’t clear, and the ice is proving very hard to remove. With only a few hours a day of above freezing temperatures, it doesn’t soften much. We’ve gone green to green taking off all the snow we can, and then have chipped away at all the ice that will crack and split off. But a lot of it is too solid to break apart, and if we were to use too much force we could easily cause damage to the turf beneath.
