​Desert courses bouncing back from recent storms

September 15, 2014

By Matt McKay

Golf courses in the Coachella Valley are set up for three sets of atmospheric certainties: Hot summer, beautiful winter and brief moments of pounding rain.

The latter setup was tested last Monday, when the courses and communities in the East end of the valley were hit by as much as 4.5 inches of rain. La Quinta was hit the hardest, as the mountainous coves that surround the city and its’ courses were battered by the downpour, and the subsequent runoff flooded streets and fairways and ravaged bunker complexes.

The event brought back memories of a similar storm which struck in late summer of 2013, forcing several long-term golf course closures in the La Quinta area. That storm kept courses like La Quinta Resort and Club’s popular Mountain Course closed for months. As the name suggests, the Mountain Course closely hugs a section of the Santa Rosas, and even ventures into canyons where water has few places to escape, particularly when it comes down at the rate it did last Monday.

SilverRock Resort has a similar relationship to the mountains. The same slices of jagged stone that make the course so spectacular on a normal basis stand ready to dump their sediments on the course below when the rains come long and heavy. SilverRock General Manager and Director of Golf Randy Duncan said this was no average storm; he got the word it was a 1,000-year event, on the heels of a 200-year storm in 2013. And there are a limited amount of precautions ground crews can take to prepare for such eventualities.

“We can handle a pretty good rainstorm. We spend a lot of time and energy fixing areas on the golf course that are prone to drainage issues,” said Duncan. “But when you have a rainstorm like that, it doesn’t stick to the rock or soak into the ground. It’s got to go down because of gravity, and the golf course is at the lowest point. There’s not a drainage system in the world that’s going to handle that.”

Like SilverRock, a majority of the other courses in La Quinta know the threat of a sudden downpour, and the clean-up routine it necessitates. PGA WEST’s Stadium and Nicklaus Tournament Courses were closed until Friday, as their bunkers eroded and low-lying areas slipped temporarily underwater. However, by Sunday, it was business as usual.

“Obviously, tremendous kudos go out to our maintenance crew. We had boots on ground from time rain stopped to the day we reopened,” said PGA WEST Tournament Clubhouse Director of Golf Anthony Holder. “It’s really amazing to see the amount of work they can accomplish when they’re all on property and working toward one common goal.”

In fact, Holder was able to make a case for the golf courses actually benefiting from the rains, citing California’s ongoing record drought.

“It’s sort of weird to say, it but I think we came out of it better than if it hadn’t happened,” said Holder. “All of our lakes and ponds are full again, and we use a lot of that (water) for irrigation. And, a lot of the areas that are hard to get to with hand watering, the rain covers. We don’t like to see that much rain that quickly, but you know what? It helped us in some ways as well.”

Because of the timing of the storm, most courses were going through their regular September maintenance routine. Not quite “the season” and not quite summer, courses were implementing groundskeeping regimens to prepare their course for the coming winter play, transitioning from summer Berumda grass to winter strains. So grounds crews were already working intensely on course conditions.

As a result, the only net effect on the courses will be a delay in implementing turf transition procedures, which might push winter grand openings back a couple of weeks. At SilverRock, there will be no effect. The back nine had been closed all summer with ongoing canal construction, and it will proceed with overseeding in October, and a Nov. 4 opening.

The exception could be La Quinta Resort and Club’s Mountain Dunes complex. The courses were not only closed Sunday, the main entrance to the gated community where the courses are located was also closed. The streets are still covered with sediment, and there was no access to the closed clubhouse and range. The 2013 storms kept the Dunes Course closed until late November, and the Mountain Course opened in January 2014. This year’s plan sounds similar.

“We’re still dealing with water on the Mountain Course, so it’s one of those things where we have to get all the water out of there before we can address the full impact of the water damage,” said Chris George, director of marketing for La Quinta Resort and Club and PGA WEST. “As of now, we’re hoping to get the Dunes Course open by Thanksgiving, and the Mountain will be some time after that. We don’t have a date for that yet.”

Other courses affected by the storms include The Quarry at La Quinta (pictured) and Indian Wells CC. Click here to take a closer look at the extent of the damage at Indian Wells CC.



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