The President's Day Ice Storm

After enjoying a couple of warm, lovely days with the snow melting and the birds chirping, Mother Nature decided to remind us that it's February.  The President's Day ice storm didn't seem bad, until the wind whipped up and decided to level trees, power lines, and just generally wreak havoc across our region.

I did manage to skate around the course to assess the damage, and didn't much like what I found.  Many limbs succumbed to the weight of the ice and left piles of debris around the bottom of the trees as if to disrobe in a rather hasty fashion.  Pine trees were most affected, due to the weight of all the frozen needles, but deciduous trees were also affected (elms and willows were the worst).  Unfortunately, many larger trees are going to be dramatically scarred from this storm at best, and perhaps killed at worst.

We will be forced to perform some major pruning and cleanup, that will start as soon as we can safely get on the course without doing major damage to the turf.

On the bright side, I have yet to see any trees completely lost, and no greens or tees have been hit with any large trees or limbs.  The storm is continuing to blast away as this is being written, so let's all cross our fingers and hope the worst is behind us. 

The white pines near #15 tee shed quite a few limbs.

About a half-inch of ice covered just about every surface.

You can see the pines especially weighted down.

That isn't snow folks.  Pure, crunchy layer of ice encasing the golf course wall-to-wall.  Wish I had a Zamboni, we could have an open skate to start the season. 

Pines between 13 and 14 lost a lot of limbs.

It's probably hard to see in this picture, but one entire side of that pine tree has almost no limbs.

I just thought this was kind of cool.  Pin on #8 encased in ice.

This may be the saddest of all the trees affected.  The beautiful white pine adjacent to #6 fairway bunker took a lot of damage.

A farther back picture of the tree on #6.  The frozen 'pond' in the foreground is the fairway bunker.

The Elm trees, with lots of fine, brittle branches also took a great deal of damage.  Here's the large elms on #9.

You can see how the overall silhouette of this elm will be affected by the loss of limbs.