The ninth and 18th holes at Cottonwood G&CC were inundated by ice and snow when the Bow River flooded early in 1996. However, flax straw covering the 18th green was intact when the ice receded, a preventive measure that saved the putting surface from real damage.

For the maintenance staff at Cottonwood Golf & Country Club in Alberta, Canada, it was a worst-case scenario. The golf course is located along the banks of the Bow River, a mountain waterway that rarely freezes, even when frigid winter temperatures worthy of the area prevail. But last year the river not only froze, it created a huge ice jam. Then, at approximately 6 p.m. on Jan. 19, the ice broke and sent an Arctic tidal wave on a mission of destruction across Cottonwood G&CC.

When superintendent Jay Leach and his assistant, Tom Newis, surveyed the damages, the casualty short list read like this:

• A sheet of ice completely covered holes No. 8 and No. 9 and partially covered Nos. 3, 4, 17 and 18.
• A bridge located behind the clubhouse was lifted by the ice and deposited in two pieces on an island in the middle of the river.
• Storage facilities built by the club on the island were encased in a canopy of ice 3 feet thick.
• Water and ice poured down the golf car ramp into the clubhouse basement to a depth of about 7 feet, damaging or destroying 40 golf cars, 25 sets of members' golf clubs, a ton of office supplies, a desk or two and several stray appliances. The icy water slowly penetrated the interior walls until the local water table dropped a long time later.

Vindication!
Considering what could have happened, however, Cottonwood got off easy. Freezing can have a horrific effect on a golf course. Turfgrass can fall prey to a host of winter maladies such as gray and pink snow mold, crown dehydration, low-temperature diseases and desiccation.

But, while a few turf problems were indeed left when the ice at Cottonwood retreated, there were darned few, according to Newis. All in all, the course's grass was in remarkably good shape. Holes eight, nine and 18 needed a jump-start in the form of a few nursery plugs, and some of the fairways had to be resodded. As a result, the season's opening was delayed, but not significantly.

To Leach and Newis it was a clear vindication of the golden rule of disaster prevention -- to avoid a problem, anticipate it.

"The Bow's bark turned out to be quite a bit meaner than its bite," Newis says. "Apart from structural damages to the bridge and clubhouse basement, the course wasn't hurt significantly. When the ice arrived, we lost five or six of our larger spruce trees, and four greens, two practice greens and three fairways were covered with 4 or 5 feet of ice and snow all the way up to the middle of May. That's not bad, considering the scope of the disaster."

Thus, the winter preparations done at Cottonwood G&CC were declared an unqualified success. "We anticipated turf health problems in '96 and didn't get many. That's the way things are supposed to work," Newis says.

Simple solutions
Cottonwood's winter maintenance program coincides with the club's closing date near the end of October. At that time, the course receives a final shot of fungicide, then the greens are covered with a layer of flax straw, which insulates the turf against fluctuations of freezing and thawing, one of the principal causes of crown hydration damage.

Generally speaking, Newis says, "to survive the winter (on northern golf courses), the crown must literally freeze and stay frozen. Freezing places the grass in a state of suspended animation. Keeping it that way through the winter keeps the plant alive."

The crown is the heart of the grass plant and without it the plant is dead. When winter weather fluctuates, the crowns thaw and moisture can enter the plant's tissue. A sudden return of freezing temperatures may expand the tissues, killing the plant. Also, a warming spell may wake the plant prematurely, causing it to use up its stored supply of carbohydrates and basically starve to death.

In that respect, a hibernating plant is not so different than a hibernating bear; for as everyone knows, waking a bear from its winter nap is not only a bad idea, it's bad for the bear.

Identifying and healing winter turf maladies
The following is a list of common winter turf afflictions and practical advice for preventing and curing them:

Desiccation and crown dehydration
Desiccation comes in two forms, atmospheric and soil. Atmospheric desiccation occurs when grass is exposed to high winds, while soil desiccation is when the moisture at the root level is severely restricted, a condition that commonly occurs in frozen earth. In both cases, the leaves go white as the plant gradually dries up and dies.

Preventing desiccation and crown dehydration, as we have seen from the example at Cottonwood G&CC, may be as simple as throwing on the ground a straw mat or some other material such as a blanket, a plastic sheet or some form of topdressing. Curing desiccation may involve using moderate nitrogen fertility levels with irrigation or hand watering.

Direct low-temperature kill
Direct low-temperature kill results when excessive moisture is combined with very low temperatures. The leaves turn a progressively darker shade of brown as ice crystals form within the plant tissues, eventually destroying them. Moderate nitrogen levels, coupled with an increase in the potassium nutritional level, may help alleviate the condition. Preventive measures include increasing cutting height, reducing thatch and avoiding excessive irrigation at critical times of the year.

Snow molds
Named for the pinkish and whitish residue they leave on their host plants, snow molds come in two types, pink (Fusarium,) and white (Typhula.) These pathogens are parasitic and deadly. The most effective treatment, as usual, is anticipatory -- moderate nitrogen nutritional levels, increased potassium and iron levels, low cutting heights and the elimination of thatch. It also helps to lay down some kind of mold inhibitor before the first snowfall.

Anticipation
At the 1979 Michigan Turfgrass Conference, Carl H. Schwartzkopf, then the director of the USGA Green Section's North-Central Region, commented on the subject of winter turf maintenance.

"Winter injury of turf is difficult to understand since it results from the interaction of a number of environmental factors, as well as soil and previous cultural practices," Schwartzkopf said. "Consequently, before a golf course superintendent can initiate the appropriate cultural program to prevent or minimize winter injury, he must determine the particular type or types of damage that occur most frequently at different locations throughout the golf course. This requires a study of the particular symptoms, including time of occurrence, soil type, topography, drainage characteristics, traffic patterns and the probability of climatic or environmental stress. This information is assembled over a period of several years and, as a result, a specific program can be established for each individual course in an attempt to minimize the possibility of winter injury."

Once this data is assembled, Schwartzkopf continued, certain patterns emerge that can guide a program of preventive maintenance. Like Leach and Newis, Schwartzkopf considered anticipation the key to success, and in the ensuing years many others would come to embrace this sensible philosophy.

Outguessing Mother Nature
Robert Jones is superintendent at the Warren Air Force Base golf course in Cheyenne, Wyo. The Wyoming winter, with its unpredictable temperature swings, can really mess up a course, Jones says. But because the club must operate with a small staff and tight budgetary restrictions, a comprehensive and costly winter turf maintenance program is simply not in the works. But Jones is a veteran turf man, and through the years the 5-year GCSAA member has learned enough about the vagaries of winter to know when to anticipate trouble.

"The main thing is to apply fungicide before the first snow falls and the ground freezes," he says. In addition, "if you get a cold winter early on, you're lucky. The ice and snow will form a canopy over the grass and protect it until the spring thaw."

Once the snow arrives, Jones goes out to the course and looks for little patches where the snow has turned to ice and become transparent. The ice acts as a prism, and when sunlight passes though it whatever is underneath warms up, which is an ideal situation for snow molds.

"I've watched a pink snow mold grow from the size of a pencil eraser to the size of half dollar in the space of 10 minutes," Jones says. "The best thing to do in this case is simply bust up the ice. But you can't just pull it off or the grass will come up with it. You have to hit it just so with a greens aerator. Once the grass is free of the ice, getting rid of the mold is easy."

Going with the flow
Allen Jaques is assistant superintendent at Dellwood Hills Golf Club, just northeast of St. Paul, Minn. Belying his position and 1-year membership in GCSAA, Jaques has served 15 seasons at the course, and even more importantly, 15 winters. Through those years he's encountered virtually every kind of winter bug, from desiccation, to crown suffocation, to snow molds.

"Mercury was 100 percent effective against snow mold," he recalls. "Unfortunately, it's now illegal to buy mercury just about everywhere, so now we experiment with other products on the tees and fairways just before the first snowfall, and hope they work. Gray snow mold can literally eat a whole course if you don't stop it in time."

The savvy warrior
Another veteran turf pro is John Haynes, superintendent at Alpine Country Club in American Fork, Utah. Haynes has been involved in golf course work since 1982 and has been a member of GCSAA the past 10 years. He's grown in two courses in his native Omaha, Neb., and has been superintendent at Green Gables Country Club and an assistant superintendent at Cherry Hills Country Club, both in Denver. His northern golf course career has trained him to handle one of the semiarid West's major winter hazards -- drought.

"Some guys lay sand on the greens to protect them from desiccation," Haynes says. "There's also something called an anti-transparent, which encases the plant in a waxy coating like the one it gets from nature. But back in Denver, we used a more simple approach, and as far as I'm concerned it worked pretty well. When winter came along and the grass got dry, we watered it."

A frequent contributor to GCM, Doug Graham is a freelance writer who lives in Columbia, Mo.