Arctic Golf--The Greens Are White

The greens are white and the balls are red, but the long winter of Lapland cannot stop golf at one of the world’s most northerly courses.

For three months a year, members of the Arctic Golf Finland Club brave the winter weather to play on a nine-hole course on a frozen river covered with three feet of snow.

Snow actually starts falling in October, but Pentti Murtovaara, president of the club in the town of Ravaniemi, five miles south of the Arctic Circle, said it was too cold to play until February.

“Before February it can be minus 30 degrees centigrade (minus 22 Fahrenheit), and if you hit a golf ball, it can crack,” Murtovaara said.

Until the Kemijoki, Finland’s biggest river, freezes with ice a yard thick, the 150-member club is confined to just three holes and a practice range.

“When it snows, we pack it down with one of those machines they use on downhill ski slopes,” Murtovaara said. “We try to make the greens, or whites as we call them, as nice as possible with no snow lumps.”

The rough is just snow, the fairway resembles a flat ski slope while the whites are hard-packed snow swept smooth.

The holes on the 1,564-yard, par-31 course are shorter than normal--the longest is just 262 yards--so players are restricted to using three irons and a putter.

Balls lost in the soft snow off the fairway are a problem, and so is the bounce. If the ball hits ice, it bounces very high. When it lands on the packed snow, it bounces a little and then rolls.

“The ball behaves rather as it would in the summer time,” Murtovaara said.

“We use red balls because it would be quite difficult to play with white ones,” Murtovaara laughed.

Club members dispense with a greenkeeper in the winter months and share the chores in keeping the course in shape. The reward of the communal effort is seen in the green (or white) fees. Club members pay annual dues of $140 while weekend guests are charged $9.50 a round. Midweek play is free.

Murtovaara said Arctic golf was growing in popularity and could take off as a tourist attraction.

A visitor from the United States brought his clubs earlier this winter. “He said it was just like normal golf,” Murtovaara said.