Buried Under Two Feet of Snow

Golf ? No problem, just wait a week

By Tom Lang

Just as the Michigan calendar turned to May, tens of thousands of golfers were outside playing on the courses of the Lower Peninsula.

Yet in the U.P., millions of new snowflakes weren’t going to let that happen. 

Golf would start taking place in early May in many years, but the northern rim of the U.P. in Marquette and the heart of copper country, Mother Nature decided to pound the Lake Superior coastline with two feet-plus of snow on April 30-May 2.

“We were two days away from opening up the Heritage golf course, and another week away from opening Greywalls,” said Craig Moore, director of agronomy at the Marquette Country Club, home to both courses. “Everything was cleaned up in April, just waiting on some areas to dry out. Then the snow came, and it was such a wet, heavy snow.

“But after the snow fell it looked devastating. It looked like we hadn’t done any spring cleanup in April. All those branches and sticks that came down in the storm, since the heavy snow and the wind picked up, needed to be picked up again because we got new branches and trees down.”

Moore’s team got to work fast and just one week later, on Tuesday May 9, golf was played on the Heritage, the original course at the club dating back to 1926 when William Langford designed the first 9 holes. Another week later, on May 16, Greywalls opened. 

“The snow went quick because a few days later it was 45-50 degrees, and the 24 inches was already down to about 8 inches by then, by settling and running off because of the warmer ground. And by the end of the week, we were already out mowing some areas (on high ground),” Moore said.

The Greywalls front nine is routed throughout a rock base with big outcroppings, but the back nine is almost all sand base, so it drains faster than most.

“And with it being such a heavy snow that melted so quickly, we had water puddles and pools in places we’d never seen it before,” Moore added. “It was a great time to come up and see the waterfalls in the U.P. that’s for sure. Our ground water levels, and lake levels, are way up.”

Moore is 46 and an MSU graduate. He served on the grounds of Kingsley Club before moving to the U.P. when Greywalls was being built in 2003. He said the full time, year-round staff is he and two others. Then two more work full time for 10 months, and the remainder is a half year full time seasonal group of nine staff, and another dozen part time helpers. He credits the entire team for the fast snow clean up, and the fact Greywalls has invested in good equipment to where the grounds crew “could not have done the same job 20 years ago.”

Greywalls has very unique geographical characteristics that designer Mike DeVries brought to life in his strategy and routing.  The course is located on rolling land high above downtown Marquette and Lake Superior, filled with sheer granite walls, striking elevation changes, rock outcroppings and more sand than anyone expected to find.

“Just trying to figure out that puzzle and make it fit together was really the challenge, but fun to figure out,” DeVries once told me about the routing he hoped to make as walk-able as possible. “It can be a roller coaster at times but it’s really great golf.”

Despite the sand base that populates a large portion of the back nine, DeVries didn’t think adding a ton of bunkers was the only option to add golfing challenges. The course has 36 traps, and half are placed on just two holes. Instead, DeVries utilized the rock formations as hazards in some cases.

“It has so many beautiful rock outcroppings,” he said. “You could never build those. You can’t manufacture that. So, utilizing those as a hazard or a feature – where just like in a bunker you can get a good lie or a bad lie – you can get a good bounce or a bad bounce off a rock outcropping.”

My favorite hole is No. 5, a short par 4 that requires a tee shot high and up onto a landing area of the fairway that’s above the tee box and to the right of a sheer rock wall. It could resemble trying to hit a home run over the Green Monster at Fenway Park. Then the green complex is surrounded by different granite walls to make no doubt you are in old mining country.

Visit: https://golfgreywalls.com/