Well this winter definitely did not go as I planned, but I feel like we still made a lot of good progress. Around mid January is when Brent resigned as Director of Agronomy and I began thinking I had a really good chance at replacing him. With that in my mind I began changing my plans of work to be done this off-season so that I would not be leaving the next person with a whole lot of disarray. We received quite a few small snow showers which kept us indoors for quite a bit. We made the best of it and were able to complete a lot of tasks in the shop. The guys sanded and refinished all the traffic stakes as well as built a new set of 50.
They also built new hazard and o.b. stakes in order to mark down the right sides of 13 and 14. The out of bounds will be the property lines along #13 and the native cut will mark the edge of the hazard along with a few red stakes. On #14 out of bounds will be marked just on the west side of the creek. Red hazard stakes will be placed on the eastern edge of the creek. We were also able to repaint all our tee markers and ball washers.
While all that was going on I was able to do something that I have been dreaming about for a year. Last year I cut down a walnut tree on 15 to try and bring more sunlight to the area where carts get back on the path down by the bridge. I also bought a chainsaw mill with the idea of making something out of the wood for the course. Now I am a complete amateur when it comes to woodworking, but I had a lot of confidence in my head for whatever reason. I had always wanted to get into the craft, but its funny what 2 small kids will to to a person's hobbies. I let my slabs of wood sit and dry all summer long and actually came out with some decent lumber. My plan was to build boxes to replace the ones that hold our divot sand on 2/5, 8, 13, and 16. Well one down and three to go.
I plan on placing this on 16 since the tree came from only 100 yards away. Next off-season I hope to be able to build 2 since now I have a blueprint in my head at least. Plus the one on 2/5 is gonna need to be built from 4x4s in order to handle a cart head on possibly in its future lol!
We also did a little horse trading and swapped some firewood for flooring tile which is a sentence I never thought I would use. I had been noticing Ashton starting to take more ownership in his role as Assistant here so I handed him a bathroom remodel project in order to keep that trend going. He did the whole thing from start to finish and it came out really nice and has improved our break area 100%.
With my new projection on this off-season I decided to pass on renting the boom lift for tree trimming so I didn't end up leaving Grant a huge mess to clean up as he started. Instead, I took the lift money and put it towards the stair project at #17 green. I knew I could complete that pretty quickly once everything was in place. And I could use the mini-x to rip out the busted steps from 12 as well. Win win and it turned out great!
The seed net is in place just to keep washouts to a minimum until we get sod laid down. The same goes for #12, where sod will be laid down in place of the current seed net. With the closure of Deer Creek we are hoping to harvest as much good turf from there once the doors close. Since I worked at Deer Creek for a couple years, I know right where to send Grant and his guys for the best. This sod adventure is also the reason that Ashton is scraping and leveling out the area on #5 where carts get back to the path from the fairway. Once we get everything leveled over there we will be able to rope it off and lay sod when we get it.
I believe that covers everything that we have been working at this winter. I still have a head full of projects that could fill 5 more winters, but it is now time for Grant to build his own ideas. He did ask me to write down the things I would like to see done throughout the years so I will for sure do that, but trust me, he will put some good thumbprints on this course of his own! Thank you all for reading and following along with the blogs for the last couple years as I truly enjoy writing them. I know Grant will continue keeping it up to date, but there is no way that his GIFs will be anywhere in the same ballpark as mine.
