The city of Durango is bracing for a dry spring and summer despite recent rains, enacting residential water restrictions last week and asking water users to be mindful of their consumption.
Michael McCloskey, Hillcrest Golf Club general manager and golf director, said the golf course collaborates with the city’s Public Works and Parks and Recreation departments to adjust its water use based on the city’s plans.
“We typically go by what they’re identifying for parks and their open space restrictions,” he said.
The city’s stage 1 water restrictions are focused on limiting the number of times residents can water their lawns to three days per week and further restricting odd-numbered and even-numbered residences to watering on separate days.
In a news release issued Friday, the city said it would “lead by example by reducing irrigation on city properties by an additional 10%.”
Public Works Director John Harris said at a City Council meeting last week Parks and Recreation has reduced the time it spends watering large parks.
McCloskey said Hillcrest manages its water use similarly to how the city irrigates its parks. The golf course joined meetings with city staff members last week to receive weekly updates on water use and the city’s planned course of action.
“We’ll play our cards the same as they’re trying to play their cards with the parks department,” he said.
He said he did not have specific quantitative data on the golf course’s water reductions at hand, but Hillcrest is voluntarily reducing its water use as entities like the city and Durango Fire Protection District underline the seriousness of drought conditions.
One tactic the Hillcrest superintendent uses to conserve water is to allow grass to grow longer because long grass has longer and deeper roots and does not require watering as frequently as short grass with shorter roots, he said.
McCloskey said from the tee to the green, Hillcrest is primarily covered with Kentucky Bluegrass, a drought-tolerant grass common for mountainous regions. The greens themselves are populated by bentgrass and poa annua, other drought-tolerant plants that survive high elevations, and hot and cold temperatures.
He said the golf course can go a couple days in a row without watering. Bentgrass can go two or three days without watering before it starts showing signs of stress and doesn’t require much water to recover.
During significant droughts, Hillcrest prioritizes which areas on the course to cut back on water usage first, he said.
Kentucky Bluegrass and native plants are the first to receive reduced irrigation, he said.
He said running sprinklers on a green for about five minutes is usually enough to get it through the day.
“The greens are the jewel of any golf course, and you never want to lose the turf on a green, because that would be multimillions of dollars to replace all of them,” he said.
2018 was the last particularly tough drought year for the golf course that McCloskey could recall. Although he was hired in 2019, he said he is familiar with the impacts to business and turf grass the drought caused and what staff had to deal with.
“It was one of those years where it was just really hot, really dry. Smoke in the air never helps,” he said. “We were getting down to just simply watering the greens and the tees on an every-other-day basis.”
The golf course watered fairways once or twice a week and watered roughs about once every two weeks, he said.
“The course was showing its stress, it was showing that it was in a drought,” he said. “Things start to go a little more dormant, things go a little more yellow, a little more brown.”
McCloskey said smoke from the 416 Fire, which burned more than 54,000 acres north of Durango in 2018, made it hard to enjoy a round of golf on the course.
The winter of 2018-19, however, was a good snow year, and the golf course bounced right back, he said.
“Golf will never go away. The golf course may be more brown, but people aren’t going to stop playing golf just because of that,” he said.
cburney@durangoherald.com
