Winterstone GC to play around excavation

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. - With above-ground construction completed on the 18-hole Winterstone Golf Course here and an opening scheduled for this month, there are still four years of below-ground construction to contend with, said Rick Boylan, president of Mid-America Golf and Landscape Inc.

The course’s developer, Rocca Processing, is mining 4.5 million square feet of underground warehouse space, which will be linked to nearby Carefree Industrial Park via a tunnel under Interstate 291.

The blasting below the course began while construction above ground was still in progress, Boylan said.

“That’s been going on for two years,” Boylan said. “Sometimes it made you want to look up and see if there was a thunder cloud coming and sometimes you felt like you’d better run for cover.”

Boylan said communication was key during the construction phase.

“There was always a coordination meeting. They’d know where we were working if there were some areas like underneath lakes where they were going to be blasting,” Boylan said. “We had to make sure the lakes were sealed so they could never leak down underneath the ground when they’re all done.”

Aside from some of the basics, Boylan was tight-lipped on his company’s process of sealing the lake beds.

“I can’t give my secrets away,” he said. “We just put PVC liner down on the bottom of it. It was a little bit more involved than that, but there’s a 40mm liner under all the lakes.”

In early April, Mid-America was finishing up some last-minute work in preparation for the opening, which Boylan said will be about 30 days ahead of schedule.

“The owner has retained us to do the site work for the parking lot and irrigation and landscaping around there – just to help get the 11th-hour stuff done,” he said.

Boylan said rather than perform blasting during off-hours, Winterstone has built the excavation below the course into its marketing plan.

“I really think this is one of the first of its kind in the country –an actual operating mine underneath the ground,” he said. “Every day at 3 o’clock, you can hear charges go off. That’s actually going to be the motto of the golf course: ‘Come feel the thunder at Winterstone.’”

Boylan said the Craig Schreiner-designed course will still be unique once the mining is complete, as well.

“For the Kansas City area, it has an Ozark feel. We’ve got some rolling terrain with a lot of 50- to 100-foot elevation changes, where most of the Kansas City courses are flat,” he said.