Settler’s Bay – Wasilla, Alaska
At Settlers Bay Golf Course in Wasilla, Alaska — sea level, on the coast, 61° north — superintendent Amos Stephens faced the hardest winter in memory: 170 days under snow and ice, long stretches near twenty below, relentless wind, and almost none of the snow that normally insulates the surface. Over a winter that long, what happens beneath the cover is everything.
So what did the greens look like when the covers finally came off in May?
Amos has been doing this a long time — “there’s not much I haven’t seen” — and this winter tested it. In Field Report No. 3, he walks through how impermeable covers over the AFS Air Flow System carried the greens through the cold and the wind, how the clear permeable drove a fast spring recovery, and what the sensors and a university study actually measured. The five takeaways — and the one result that surprised even him — are worth the read for any superintendent planning for a winter they can’t predict.