Bemidji Town & Country Club Reopens Golf Course After Clearing 350 Fallen Trees

Friday’s storm left no part of the community untouched, including the shore along the northernmost part of the lake where the Bemidji Town & Country Club sits.

Roughly 350 trees fell on and around the golf course, but none on the greens, tee boxes, or infrastructure, including the clubhouse. Cleanup work began early Saturday morning with an assessment of the damage.

“It was overwhelming at first, but then, just trying to get a game plan together to clean up the golf course,” said Matson Gravelle, superintendent of grounds at BTCC. “It’s important to get to the dump pile to dump wood. And then it’s really focusing on areas that are in play [on the golf course)].”

He continued, “At first we just went numerical in order. We started on [hole] 1, we went to 2, and then we finished on 18. It took four days, but we got ‘er done.”

The grounds crew at BTCC was aided in the cleanup by volunteers armed with gardening equipment. Thanks to their efforts, the course was able to reopen Wednesday with the first golfers teeing off at 2 p.m.

“A lot of our members came out and volunteered their time to do a lot of raking, a lot of detail cleanup,” Gravelle said. “It was a team effort. It was pretty humbling just to see all these people out here helping out and just the pride they have in this golf course.”

Now, the grounds crew can get back to focusing on getting ready for the Birchmont Tournament, which is just one month away.

“We’ll be ready for the Birchmont. We’ll get the greens rolling, and I’m not too concerned,” he said assuredly. “I don’t think it’ll affect the tournament that much. We just have some extra work to do to continually clean up this golf course. I think it’ll be another few weeks to finally get caught up with with this storm.”

Gravelle did joke the “silver lining” was that the greens and fairway turf got four days of recovery time, something they would normally never get during the summer months.