Photos from my first day out on the Greenback course.

It was a cold one out there.  Outside of me, there were only about 2 other groups actually playing golf.  It wasn’t really a bad day, but the ground was completely frozen which made for interesting approach shots..  Hitting the green was had just as much bounce as landing the ball on a cart path.

I played a few balls on each hole of the front 9 of Heron Lakes’ Greenback golf course.  I’d never been out there, not even to walk it, and was pleasantly surprised with the quality and range of different holes.  It starts off with a nice dog-leg right par 5 and also included a couple par 3′s over water (which I don’t get to play yet because they are more than 50 yards, but soon!)

This next shot is an example of what you have to deal with on days like today.  I call it an “ice save” because of the lack of sand in the sand trap.

Surprisingly, I managed a nice shot with my sand wedge that landed about 5 feet from the pin, one of the highlights from the day.  I’m not sure if you are supposed to play it how it lies in a situation like this, but I figure if you can stand over it you might as well hit it, right?  In this next image, I guess there are some occasions where you should just leave it be and dig out another ball from your bag.  Perhaps in Minnesota you could walk out there, but I wasn’t about to test the strength of this ice!

It’s hard to see in the pic, but there’s a couple balls out there on the ice shelf.

Hitting five over for 36 “holes” (played from 50 yards or less) I definitely had a handful of missed shots.  Some, including my coach, would say that every shot is a missed shot to some degree and I believe that.  It’s very rare to get a hole in one and often when you do it’s because you messed something up and the ball ended up in the cup.  So, the game is more about managing your miss hits rather than appreciating perfection (it would be great if you really could do exactly what you wanted every time, but then again there wouldn’t be any challenge to the game and, in turn, the allure of golf would go right out the window).  That all said, I did have one of my 113 shots act according to my will.  It was a thing of beauty, making solid contact on a 3/4 pitching wedge swing and watching the ball fly 62 yards to the green and then slowly roll up and tap the pin, landing a foot from the hole!

In this next pic, you can get a sense of scale for the shot, although it’s a bit hard to make out the flagstick in the distance.

It was on the last hole, too, so a great way to end the day.  I’ve found that no matter how your day goes, as long as you end it on a good note you will be excited to go back to work the next day, so even if it takes me an extra hour, I’ll always make sure I leave with a good taste in my mouth.

Speaking of that, this final image is not exactly gallery worthy, but I found it strangely inspiring.  Out there in this frozen tundra’d January world, this little flower managed to perk up for the afternoon and blossom against the odds.  Not sure what it means, but at least something is adding a bit of color this gray world!

Thanks for reading!!