Throughout the month of March we worked on the rail berm project. The reconstruction of this railroad berm adds some interesting ground contours to the right of the first green which needed to be completely rebuilt anyway since the tree removal there was so extensive. It's also a nice reminder of how important the railroad is to the history of the Club and the city of Tacoma.
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| The first thing we did was paint out the entire mainline on the ground as close as we could to what was designed on the computer. While doing this we adjusted the routing of the mainline to better fit around trees and other obstacles. These types of adjustments can only be made in the field. The computer design is really good, but it's these "in the field" decisions which will give us a mainline pipe system that works the best it possibly can, and should last 100 years. In this picture you see the use of a GPS (Global Positioning system) stick thingy which marks the exact location of things so that the information can be put on a computer. That information or location data is essential for designing anything nowadays, and it is really amazing how powerful this is when you're dealing with a design that encompases 120 acres of land. |
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| So using the GPS stick thingy we mapped all the "in the field" adjustments we made so that the design is as accurate as possible. We also put all the new trees we planted on the map by locating their position exactly. Go to the documents page of this website and you can see all the maps that were built for this project using this GPS technology. |
During the months of January through March, we removed over 180 douglas fir trees. These trees were either in the way of our new irrigation system design, or they were shading our native Garry oak trees and/or shading our primary turf surfaces. We bought our own stump grinder in order to be in total control of the restoration process. To date we have laid over 72,000 square feet of sod during repairs. We also imported 22 Garry oak trees as an ongoing effort to restore, and preserve the historic oak savanna landscape.
