A golfer at Pine Valley taking advantage of an early start to the season

By Tommy Osborne

Golf

Prince George golf season starts incredibly early

Apr 4, 2024 | 5:08 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – With an opening day of March 29, the Pine Valley Golf Centre kicked off one of the earliest golf seasons in recent memory.

“As far as I know, it’s the earliest we’ve ever been opened and the greens are perfect and everything. So we said, ‘let’s go ahead and do it.’ There might be some days where we have to wait for the frost to go off the grounds, but other than that, we’re good,” said Margaret Goings, Pine Valley Golf Centre’s Manager.

Golfers have been out taking full advantage of an early opening, as Pine Valley was packed during the Easter Long Weekend, and has seen steady activity since opening day. It’s not just great for the golfers though, as Pine Valley has gotten a head start on revenue as a result.

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“We’ve had a lot of people say, ‘when are you guys opening? You know, can we come out golfing?’ And we’ve been busy since we’ve opened up, so it’s a real nice boost for us right now,” Going said.

An El Niño winter is the primary reason the golf season has started so early, and even though it’s tailing off UNBC Professor of Environmental Science Stephen Dery expects the warmer days will continue.

“El Niño is not going to disappear too quickly. I think it’s still going to have a bit of an influence into the spring, if not summer, so I anticipate it’s going to still be quite dry, and we’ll have some lovely days to do some golfing,” Dery said.

As El Niño wraps up, Dery says we could be in for more rain. While that of course prevents a day of golf, in the long run he says this is also good news for golfers, since it would bring some much needed precipitation against wild fires.

“I think the main concern for many golfers would be the presence of wildfire smoke. So if we do have an intense wildfire season as we experience in 2023 that might make golfing a little bit less enjoyable. So we’ll see, perhaps we’ll have just the average precipitation year and that would obviously be quite good for golfing this summer,” he said.

Dery added La Niña conditions could be coming in for the fall, which could bring cooler days and more precipitation, but he expects the majority of the golf season and summer to be similar to what we’ve experienced over the last couple of months: warmer and dryer than usual.

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