A New Season Begins

Bella and I on a course Tour

I hope everyones holiday season was filled with lots of friends, family, great food, and good times. I had a great holiday season with my girlfriend's family in Airdrie, where Santa was very kind to me. I am slowly getting my mind back into golf course mode as most of this years planning I completed before our holiday break. I am starting to focus on all our on course furniture and accessories. We are going to be replacing all the ballwashers and garbages on the front nine, as well as redoing all the benches and signs. This year we have decided to utilize a single flag system on our greens, so therefore a pin sheet will now be added to the score card. We have yet to settle on a flag design, but I am thinking it will be something very simple.

#8 Green

The course has received a good accumulation of snow over the last two months. Most greens have a minimum of 7 inches of snow cover on them. I am very happy with the way they have wintered, due to a great layer snow insulating them and for the fact I have not found any ice. The abundance of snow has also attracted some unwanted traffic the past few weeks. I believe it has only happened once, but a snowmobile made its way onto the golf course from the northeast corner of the back nine. They travelled across a few greens, but I believe the most damage was done on holes 13 and 14. They went up and down the hills on those fairways running their tracks right down to the dirt. There is really no way to prevent the snowmobiles from entering the property, so hopefully common sense will prevail and we will not see this happen again .

Tracks across 13 green

Damage from Snowmobiles

 

We continue to do functions in the off-season in our new banquet facility. With all the snow received I am happy that we added a new piece of equipment to remove the snow from our entrance and parking. We have mounted a blade onto the front of our golf course truck and it has worked well. In the past they had used the John Deere tractor with the bucket on it to remove the snow. I used this method once in the spring and knew we needed a better solution. I am very happy with our new blade the we purchased from Home Depot on line. It is a 90 inch blade controlled by hydraulic motors powered off the vehicle battery. This new method of clearing snow does a much better job in half the time, not to mention the fact that you can do it in a heated cab, which is a huge plus.

New blade on truck

This year is going to be an exciting one for us at Dinosaur Trail. Many of the staff members will be back from last years team as we continue to build on what we accomplished last season. We have been awarded the 2013 Alberta Mid-Amateur Championship in early August, so we will no doubt be building up to that event. I am hoping we can complete afew projects and continue to improve our irrigation system, but that will only happen if the budget permits. If not, look for us to do a few small projects in house, but they will be limited and only a band-aid to deal with the problems for another year or two.

I really plan to contribute to this blog more than once a month this year, but I am not going to promise anything. Thank you to everyone that followed my blog last year and hopefully I can keep the Dino Trail Turf Care Blog interesting this year.

Mitch