Alaska’s golf season is short and sensational. Here’s how it ends

Every time a moose walks throughout a inexperienced, it leaves a mark.

Every particular person step leaves a mark, actually. A big moose is bigger than the most important horse, so its hooves sink into the weak turf. Fixing the injury from one moose promenade is form of like repairing a number of massive, uneven ball marks.

But the issues actually begin when the moose go after the flagsticks. They prefer to circle across the holes, to play with the flags, typically to chew or head-butt them.

“Red flags are a big deal to them,” Bill Engberg tells me. “Each time I see massive amounts of damage, the red flagstick is a common denominator.”

Engberg simply completed his seventeenth season as superintendent at Birch Ridge, a nine-hole course on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, the place he says he removed the purple flagsticks as quickly as he bought the job. Before this job he was the professional at close by Bird Homestead (recognized to locals as “Funny River”), a nine-holer the place the bull moose used to struggle on the greens, which made for some difficult agronomy. He removed all purple flags there, too. Next yr he’s taking up the operations at Kenai Golf Course. Among the primary orders of enterprise: changing the purple flags.

“The babies are curious about the flagsticks and seem to literally play Ring Around the Rosie,” he says. The moms normally get bored and get lost into the woods, and the calves will ultimately comply with, however not earlier than inflicting some injury. It’s a reminder that the course exists on the mercy of the encompassing nature. In this a part of the world, there are lots such reminders.

Every course in Alaska has its personal set of moose tales. One of the most effective — or worst — comes from the aptly named Moose Run in Anchorage, the state’s solely 36-hole facility. The story goes that early one morning on its Creek Course, a member of the turf crew was out working when a feminine moose walked onto a close-by inexperienced and grabbed the flagstick between her tooth. She bent it almost in two earlier than finally letting it go, sending the flagstick whipping. But on its recoil it thwacked her on the rear, sending her right into a mode Engberg calls “full on rototiller.” She proceeded to tear aside your entire placing floor.

They’d play a short lived inexperienced for the remainder of the season.

What’s the tip of the golf season like in Alaska? That’s the rationale I phoned up Engberg, who’s referred to as “Kenai Bill” or “Bill the Thrill,” an enthusiastic, eccentric, important patch of the Alaskan golf quilt. We’d met just a few years again after I traveled to the Last Frontier to chronicle the smallest U.S. Open qualifier. But that was in May, which gave me a peek on the season’s starting. How concerning the season’s conclusion?

“It’s … different,” Engberg says. “A lot of the stuff we do in Alaska is unique to Alaska, not even Minnesota or southern Canada. The only thing similar is the Yukon — and maybe Norway or Sweden, I don’t know.”

Playing golf in Alaska means enjoying epic golf. Adventure golf. If you’re enjoying early season which means you’re braving the weather; frozen turf, whipping winds, probability of snow. If you’re enjoying midseason golf which means you’re within the land of the midnight solar; you would tee off at 12 a.m. or 12 p.m. and get 18 in both approach. Alaskan programs unfold within the shadows of glaciers. They’re hewn from thick forests. They gaze throughout glassy bays. The enjoying season is short and spectacular.

It’s December now, which implies Alaska’s fairways and greens have been closed for weeks. Some programs, Kenai included, shut their doorways Oct. 1. Others dangle on so long as they’ll; after weeks of on-and-off frost delays and half-days — customary for this time of yr — Birch Ridge closed for the season on Oct. 22. Palmer, a muni simply north of Anchorage that’s usually the final holdout within the state, closed on Oct. 29. The day we spoke, in a single day temperatures in Soldotna, house to Birch Ridge, dipped beneath zero levels Fahrenheit.

But Engberg has migrated to Palm Springs, Calif., the place he’s engaged on the turf crew on the Classic Club this winter. He’s been making this seasonal pilgrimage south for years, leaving at season’s finish and returning in April, when the ice begins to soften in earnest.

It’s that ice, he says, that makes Alaskan programs a novel problem to resuscitate come springtime. The state’s temperatures are excessive, for one factor. But it’s the quantity of ice buildup within the floor that basically makes the distinction. The ice runs deep, two or three or 4 ft underneath the floor. And as a result of chilly temperatures persist all through April and May, incessantly dropping beneath freezing in a single day, the ice doesn’t soften shortly. The grass stays dormant for a lot of May and the ensuing turf has a wierd duality; it’s bouncy in locations the place the ice nonetheless sits on the floor and it’s soggy elsewhere, from irrigation or soften, the place the water hits the ice layer and swimming pools there, with nowhere to go. Engberg speaks of this problem the best way Carl Spackler would possibly describe a gopher.

“Ice,” he says, “is your enemy.”

Every superintendent’s season-ending activity, then, is to attempt to do one thing to make the spring’s rebooting course of as painless as doable. But there’s no silver bullet.

“There are plenty of different strategies and priorities,” Engberg says. “Some courses don’t do anything at all. At Birch, our end-of-season maintenance was aerification and heavy sand. That was the priority.”

One level of differentiation is winter tarping. While some programs rope off their greens and cowl them up, Engberg isn’t satisfied of their effectiveness, estimating they could give a course little greater than a one-week head begin within the spring. He’s additionally satisfied that by midsummer, his greens rolled the purest within the state.

“There’s more to life than tarps,” he says.

Some {golfing} locals make like Engberg and migrate south for the winter to seasonal retreats in California or Arizona or Texas; others plan out two-week escapes to Hawaii, the place there are direct flights. Those are the fortunate ones, Engberg says.

“The unlucky ones are just jonesing,” he says.

There’s lots else to occupy their time, after all. There’s some pure hibernation that occurs in Alaska’s darkish winters but in addition loads of actions. Hockey. Snowmachining (aka snowmobiling). Cross-country snowboarding. Some of those actions even occur on the programs themselves.

“One year they did sleigh rides at Birch, but the damage was ridiculous,” Engberg remembers. “It was like when golf carts drive in the same spot every single time, only worse.”

Those who dwell round Anchorage have entry to simulators at Moose Run or to the Golf Dome at Fox Hollow, an govt course and indoor coaching facility. Down on the Kenai Peninsula, although, the one simulator was on the bowling alley, which has since been torn down. In different phrases, as soon as springtime comes round, native golfers are chomping on the bit.

The finish of each season additionally marks a brand new starting. That will show true for Engberg, who is anticipating some awkwardness subsequent season after the best way issues ended at Birch Ridge. His jurisdiction was threatened by a part-time worker who, Engberg says, got here in and thought he might name all of the photographs. Engberg, who had his personal concept how issues must be run, didn’t take kindly to taking orders. “He and I didn’t get along,” he says merely. After forcing course possession to decide on — him or me — and not getting the reply he needed, Engberg gave his two weeks’ discover in September.

The world of Alaskan golf is a small one. The largest state within the U.S. has simply 22 programs, simply eight of them 18 holes, each one in all them public-access. Engberg’s new employer, Kenai Golf Course, is simply 11 miles from Birch Ridge. It’s the one 18-hole facility on the peninsula. People will speak.

Engberg’s focus is on Kenai’s greens, which have been struggling for years. He likens his state of affairs to an NFL coach taking up a struggling franchise; he would possibly get a yr’s grace interval however in the end is aware of he’ll want to supply outcomes.

Also like an NFL head coach, Engberg plans to convey his workers with him as he switches jobs. That’s made easier by the truth that his crew is assembled from native excessive schoolers, lots of whom have come by way of the native junior program he additionally runs. He insists their youth is extra asset than legal responsibility.

“Their work ethic, whether it’s because of the community, their parents, whatever it is, they come to work,” he says. “And they’re bright, they’re top of their class. For people who think mowing grass doesn’t take intelligence, it does when you’re a small crew and you’re doing a little bit of everything and it’s like, ‘go do those greens, when you’re done with that fix this tee box, when you’re done with that go tag-team the rough, then let’s go take lunch.’”

Work expertise, he provides, is no assured achieve.

“I’ve worked with adults who have washed out on other jobs and though turf would be easy,” he says. “They don’t focus on technique, don’t care to learn. The kids? They see how much the details matter to me and they end up policing themselves. Taking ownership. They end up pushing me instead of the other way around.”

Engberg plans to take his band of excessive schoolers to Kenai. Some are golfers; some aren’t. They’re cellists, hockey gamers, horseback riders, college students.

“They’re not going to be turf people for their lives, but this will be a stepping-off point for them.”

So what’s the tip of the golf season like in Alaska? Really, it’s rather a lot like golf in some other cold-weather locale. More moose. More ice. Fewer individuals. Fewer programs. The vacationers have gone for the season, leaving a scene of native diehards enjoying out their remaining rounds. Wintertime is when Alaskan golf performs exhausting to get. But its winter hibernation makes it that a lot sweeter when that first sunny May day rolls round.

Just maintain an eye fixed out for purple flags.

Dylan Dethier

Golf.com Editor

Dylan Dethier is a senior author for GOLF Magazine/GOLF.com. The Williamstown, Mass. native joined GOLF in 2017 after two years scuffling on the mini-tours. Dethier is a graduate of Williams College, the place he majored in English, and he’s the writer of 18 in America, which particulars the yr he spent as an 18-year-old dwelling from his automobile and enjoying a spherical of golf in each state.