Every year 36 professionals and amateurs travel to Greenland to compete in the World Ice Golf Championship. A town in western Greenland, about 370 miles north of the Arctic Circle, plays host to this event annually. Extreme golfers from around the world brave icy winds and temperatures that can drop to minus 50º to play the game they love. The par 5 fairway bends around an iceberg, the rough is a 2 inch layer of frozen ice, and bunkers are replaced by seal holes. Oh”¦and the “green” is white and the white ball is red. The World Ice Golf Championship truly is one of the world’s most unique sporting events.
Thankfully, conditions aren’t quite as arctic here in Colorado, but if you play during the winter months, you may encounter your fair share of snow or ice on the golf course. According to the Rules of Golf, “snow and natural ice, other than frost, are either casual water or loose impediments at the option of the player”. How a player takes relief from snow depends on where their ball lies and if they want to consider the snow casual water or a loose impediment.
For example, let’s say that a player’s ball comes to rest in a drift of snow in a bunker. According to Rule 23 ““ Loose Impediments, a player may not remove loose impediments from a bunker without penalty when his ball lies in the same bunker. In this case, the player would be foolish to consider the snow a loose impediment because he would not get free relief. If he decided to brush the snow away from his ball, he would be penalized two strokes in stroke play or loss of hole in match play.
However, in the scenario above, the player would be able to play the snow as casual water and get free relief from the abnormal ground condition. Rule 25-1b says that in order to take relief from an abnormal ground condition, in this case snow, the player may lift the ball and drop it without penalty within one club-length of and not nearer the hole than the nearest point of relief. Additionally, when the ball is in a bunker, the nearest point of relief must be in the bunker. As you can see, knowing the rules can be a tremendous advantage and can save the player an unnecessary penalty.
Most of us aren’t looking to be crowned Greenland’s the next World Ice Golf Champion, but we are itching to play golf during the Colorado winter months where it can snow on Tuesday and be 55 and sunny on Wednesday. Just wear your golf shorts under your snow pants and make sure that you know what to do when your ball finds a stray snow drift or frozen puddle.
