Some southern California desert golf courses weathered Hilary better than others

PALM DESERT, Calif. — No time is a good time for a tropical storm to dump a year’s worth of rain on the Coachella Valley in just 48 hours. But August might be the least-disruptive time for such a weather disaster to hit desert golf courses. Still, golf course operators face plenty of work in the coming weeks to recover from the rare tropical storm.

“If we have a foursome on the tee sheet right now, it’s a busy day for us,” Brett Draper said Tuesday. He is general manager and COO of Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage. “This is a quiet time of year, a time of year where we do a lot of our construction work not only on the golf course but throughout the club. So the impact to us, it’s as close to zero as possible with regard to play.”

While most of the snowbird membership at Thunderbird did not see the damage from flooding and debris at their private course in Rancho Mirage, it is evident to anyone driving past the course. Thunderbird is one of dozens of desert courses impacted by flooding in various desert washes or runoff from the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains because of Tropical Storm Hilary.

From layouts with a few downed trees to courses with mud and water damage that will take months to repair, Hilary’s impact on desert courses was felt throughout the entire Coachella Valley. But at Thunderbird and other private clubs, it could have been worse.

“I think we had like six golfers,” said Chris Gilley, head pro at La Quinta Country Club which was open for play Tuesday. “So of all the months to do it, this is less effective of the membership. And to be honest, there is no cool-season grass left right now, so the Bermuda grass can probably handle (the weather) better than what we get in the winter.”

The Whitewater Wash, turned into a roaring river of water, mud, tree limbs and palm fronds by Hilary, cuts through four holes at Thunderbird, the fourth, ninth, 10th and 18th. The course also saw mud and debris flow on the course from a spillway at the third hole just off Highway 111.

“It’s a part of having a golf course in the wash,” Draper said. “We will get it cleaned up as quickly as we can and we hope to have everything ready by the end of September, the first of October so we can start the overseed process with the eventual opening of the second Saturday in November.”

Draper said he is not concerned that a soggy golf course will delay overseeding, the transition from summertime Bermuda grass to a cool-weather grass like rye. Overseeding is generally done when a golf course is relatively dry.

“This is the desert. It’s all Bermuda and blow sand. So things dry up pretty quick,” Draper said. “The wash right now, we still have a little bit of a trickle in it, so it’s starting to dry out. We will start moving some of that material that came on the property.”

Cleaning up after the tropical storms is the biggest problem for many courses.

“We probably get hit harder than other golf courses,” said Randy Duncan, general manager of SilverRock Resort, the 18-hole golf course at the base of the Santa Rosa Mountains in La Quinta. “We do get a lot of the watershed that comes off the mountain and gets up into our bunkers and our cart paths.”

Duncan said SilverRock was fortunate to be closed for yearly course maintenance when Hilary hit, but a scheduled opening for this Sunday has been moved to Sept. 1. Duncan said such maintenance is scheduled for August because July and August see little play on the public-access course.

Cleanup work begins

“We’ve got quite a bit of cleanup here to do. Just labor intensive work, clearing up bunkers, cleaning off cart paths,” Duncan said. “We lost close to 30 trees out here, some of them are blocking cart paths. Rain doesn’t do well here in the valley.”

Duncan added that some cart paths were washed out entirely by the flood waters and some of the maintenance work done in the last few weeks was wiped out.

“We just went through and had all the bunker perfectly dialed in,” Duncan said. “Now we have to go back and re-do them all.”

Just a few miles from SilverRock is La Quinta Country Club, which is separated from the base of the mountains by two courses at La Quinta Resort. While the resort’s Mountain and Dunes course still had extensive standing water Wednesday, La Quinta Country Club escaped much damage.

“The biggest damage from a superintendent’s standpoint was a beautiful eucalyptus that was planted five years ago in a nice place in the left rough on No. 1 that was beautiful and doing great,” Gilley said. “It uprooted. It’s not like it was heavy, it was just one that got taken out by the wind.”

Gilley said a project to renovate the course’s greens on the front nine before The American Express PGA Tour event in January has not been impacted by the tropical storm. Forty trees recently planted on the course all withstood the wind. One older large palm tree did come down next to the 17th tee, he said.

Not every golf course in the desert was hammered by Hilary. The Lights at Indio Golf Course actually suffered more structural damage from a monsoonal thunderstorm last Friday night than it did from the tropical storm Sunday, head professional Dave Ruvolo said. The thunderstorm tore the roof off a patio area Friday, but the golf course was ready for play Monday just after the tropical storm.

“We opened up in the morning just to check it out, but we had standing water on the greens,” Ruvolo said. “But my course drains really, really well. First of all, we are away from the mountains. Second of all, the course just really dries like crazy. It’s just beautiful. It’s awesome.”

At Sunrise Country Club, which borders Thunderbird to the east but does not have a wash cutting through it, damage was far less that at the neighboring course.

“We had a little bit of washout from the edge of our roads, but really nothing bad,” General Manager Hale Kelly said. “We actually fared pretty well. We had a couple of washouts along the wash, our perimeter wall there. Just a little bit of roof damage from some falling palm trees. Other than that, nothing.”

Like other private clubs, Kelly said his club only gets about 20 to 30 rounds a day in the hot summer months.

“It’s like everywhere in the valley. It’s done by 9 o’clock as far as the tee sheet is concerned,” Kelly said.

Like Draper, Duncan said there isn’t much for a golf course in a wash or at the base of the mountains to do when a big rain storm hits the desert.

“It’s beautiful to watch the watershed come down the mountain,” Duncan said. “It’s beautiful until it gets to the golf course.”