Foster Gulch golf board to undertake numerous projects

The Foster Gulch Golf Course has an ambitious schedule of improvements planned for 2025, golf course board president Tim Winland told the Lovell Town Council Tuesday night.

Addressing the council at the regular March meeting, Winland presented a budget request for 2025-26 in the amount of $40,000 for the “maintenance  of mowers/reels, sand, fertilizer, sprinklers and equipment upgrades.

Broken down, the golf board is requesting $20,000 for sand, fertilizer, reel maintenance and equipment maintenance; $5,000 for sprinklers; and $15,000 for equipment upgrades.

Winland noted that the course received 7,714 visitors in 2024, including 1,023 users from Powell and 154 from Cody and visitors from 29 states, notably 145 from Montana.

“We like to attract people from various communities to come and enjoy the golf course in the area, and hopefully the town,” Winland said.

He thanked the council for the town’s continuing support and presented a list of projects the board hopes to complete in 2025. He said the board increased the size of the fourth hole green, but the green ended up becoming uneven.

“It’s just got too many undulations in it right now, and it keeps getting scalped in certain areas, so we’re going to take those out,” Winland said. “That’s one of the projects. A high priority for us is to come in with sod cutter, take some of those high spots out, level it and roll it so it’s more flat up top.”

Another top priority is to fix the drain behind hole number five, Winland said.

“If you’ve ever been back there, which I have plenty of times, it’s pretty swampy,” he said. “We’ve worked with the county on trying to figure out the best way to remove that standing water back there. Pete Baxendale is going to come in with Midway Construction and put basically a French drain in there and run it all the way to the creek.

“So we’re hoping that that alleviates that problem. It’s not so much that we worry about golfers being back there, but we can’t mow it. The mowers get stuck. They just bog down. And so eventually we can’t get in there, and then it turns into a big weed patch. So we want to fix that.”

The golf board also plans to add an additional bunker (sand trap) on hole number two and hole number five, using black sand for the bunker.

“We can’t get grass to grow in those areas anyway, so we thought we’d put some bunkers and make it a little harder for us,” Winland said.

He said using black sand is a novelty and that the only other course in the region using black sand that he knows of is in Anaconda, Montana.

Also in the works are new highway signs to be erected this spring and a new net for the driving range, Winland said, noting that the current net is torn to the point where it “just flaps in the wind.”

“We can’t stretch it any tighter now. It just rips. But we have a net already that we purchased years ago, and we think will work for that stretch,” Winland noted.

The board is working with Mountain Construction to smooth rough spots on the cart paths using gravel base and road mix to save wear and tear on carts.

Another effort to reduce cart wear and tear is restricting where carts can drive off the fairways.

“We’re buying about 1,000 feet of yellow cord and some stakes to rope off some areas that we don’t want our carts driving into, that are just too rough on them,” Winland said. “It bounces them too much. We don’t want the course carts going out (in certain areas). It just rattles them, and bolts come loose and stuff, so we’re going to rope off some areas and strategically try and keep people in the fairways or on the cart paths.”

Winland said the golf board removed several dead or dying trees this winter and plans to purchase 12 Austrian pines to be planted in certain places. Another project will be to lengthen hole number five by about 75 yards, Winland said, and move the tee box as a result.

Finally, for the first time in many years the Foster Gulch Golf Course will be rated this summer by an organization that will come in and assess the difficulty of the course, Winland said, adding that he hopes all of the projects will be completed before the course is rated so the assessment will be current and accutate. The plan is then for the course to be rated every eight years.