Wyaton Hills Golf Course cleaning up after tornado

wMax Halberg Jr. left Wyaton Hills Golf Course early for the day Tuesday afternoon, because he saw storms approaching and knew there wasn’t going to be any more business.

By the time he got home to Manlius, the longtime Wyaton Hills owner said he got a call from Cory Rokey, who said, “You got golf carts all over the place.”

Halberg returned to find the course showing the aftermath of a tornado strike, confirmed by a video of the twister from a passerby on Route 6.

Trees were knocked down and limbs and branches thrown about across the course.

The golf carts were pushed forward, but none were rolled over.

Fences by the driving range and a tee block were knocked over.

The memorial cross on the north fence line was buried by fallen trees.

With the help of friends, club members and high school golfers, Halberg has spent the rest of the week cleaning up and is planning to be open for business Saturday morning.

“Hopefully, in a month you won’t even know it happened,” Halberg said. “Ain’t too much you can do about it. Just grin and bare it. You can’t fool Mother Nature. She’s just going to do what she wants to do. It could have been worse.”

Halberg hasn’t taken an official count, but he’s guessing he lost about 30 trees.

“This is the third day now, so we’ve got a lot done,” Halberg said as he took a ride around the course Friday afternoon. “If I didn’t have friends, I wouldn’t have a chance. They make a big difference. That’s what small towns are about.”

The grove of pine trees between the No. 2 and No. 3 fairways took a direct hit, many snapped in two and others knocked down completely down.

“I guess I’ll have to go in the tree planting business again,” Halberg said. “I planted all those trees when they were like this big (about an inch) in ‘83. That was the soil conservation service for 69 cents or a buck or something like that.”

Ironically, Halberg pointed out three trees “that everybody wanted down to cut across here (on hole 6)” didn’t get damaged.

This isn’t the first time Halberg has had to clean up after a big storm.

“I’ve been here 42 years and this is the third time I’ve had to do this,” he said. “The big one was in 2009. I lost 54 trees. I had a great big black walnut. And that was a beautiful tree.

“Then that derecho (in 2020) we lost about 20 (trees) in that.”

Halberg pointed to some spruce trees in the middle of the course, that he said were all snapped off about 10 feet from the top in the 2009 storm, but have since grown back.

“Mother Nature is pretty amazing,” he said.

A massive pile of trees and debris keeps getting bigger and bigger on the back side of the machine shed as the clean up continues.

“I told Jenica (Cole) when we have the Chamber golf outing we’ll have a big wienie roast,” Halberg said with a laugh.