AUGUSTA, GEORGIA | It’s been nearly seven months since Hurricane Helene roared through the hometown of the Masters with such violence it left a wake of inland devastation on a 500-mile trek from Florida’s “Big Bend” to the western Carolina mountains.
The scars from that trauma, however, are not easily erased. Drive down Walton Way – the once heavily canopied thoroughfare through the heart of Augusta lined with stately Southern homes – and those scars are still readily visible. Power lines hang low enough in places you could jump up and reach; blue tarps still adorn roofs of homes that used to be hidden behind massive trees, some of which still lay uprooted across lawns or are stacked in massive debris piles like boneyards scattered across the area, including the old minor-league ballpark at Lake Olmstead.
Inside the gates of Augusta National Golf Club, however, the scars are invisible. The players in this week’s Masters field won’t really notice anything different about the course. It’s immaculate and pristine and ready for its annual close-up as the launching point for golf’s major-championship season.
But to anyone who’s been to the Masters before, the difference is immediately noticeable. It looks like it got a haircut with thinning shears from one end of the property to the other.
“It looked a lot thinner,” 2013 champion Adam Scott said after a Sunday practice round. “I remember when we came back in 2014 after the ice storm it looked thinner. Maybe a little more so now. Little more so on the front nine.”
Roughly a couple thousand trees from the ANGC clubhouse to the adjacent Augusta Country Club clubhouse across Rae’s Creek were wiped out in the wee hours of Sept. 27 when the National Weather Service recorded wind gusts up to 82 mph at Augusta Regional Airport with sustained tropical storm-force winds.
First responders reported that trees across the region fell on many houses, cars and roads in the area. There was significant damage to neighborhoods near ANGC, with roads and neighborhoods from Aiken, South Carolina, to Thomson, Georgia, cut off by downed trees and mangled power lines.
“Literally, this hurricane, it’s like a 250-mile-wide tornado had hit,” said Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in a press conference outside the James Brown Arena in downtown Augusta after assessing the damage days after Helene blew through. “To see the level of the destruction that a hurricane can do, in this community, being this far from … the Florida line, is unprecedented.”
Helene was still a Category 1 storm when it zagged eastward and hit Augusta more than 300 miles after churning through the Gulf of Mexico and making landfall south of Tallahassee, Florida. The area is typically a haven that shelters coastal residents fleeing hurricanes instead of a victim, and Helene is the costliest natural disaster in the city’s history. It took weeks to restore power and water to many residents and more than a month to get internet service back. Damaged and destroyed homes are still prevalent throughout the region.
“It happened in a couple of hours, and it will take months, years for us to recover and get back to some sense of normalcy,” Britney Pooser, executive director of the HUB for Community Innovation Augusta that served as the base for a massive relief effort, told the Masters Journal.
Augusta National contributed heavily to the community recovery even as it was able to get its own house in order quickly enough to open its season only a couple of weeks delayed in late October. The club has planted hundreds more smaller pines to fill in some gaps, but the corridors that used to define some of the holes have been exposed.
Players can now hit draws clean over the shorter treetops left off the first and into the ninth fairway without touching a pine needle. Patrons will find more abundant sunshine and expansive views in dozens of areas, most especially around the par-3 sixth and 16th holes – the latter’s green bearing the brunt of the damage from fallen trees that required it to be rebuilt. Only one large pine remains between greens on 15 and 16 and only four stand now between 16 green and 17 tee leaving the area covered in sunshine instead of shadows.
“We could never see that up there,” three-time champion Nick Faldo said Sunday of being able to see all the way to the fifth green from behind the 18th. “I think that’s probably quite nice. It might even add even more color with the patrons out there.”
But that will matter little to the competitors inside the ropes.
“I was expecting it to look a lot different and play a little different, right? Because with less trees it might play different,” 2018 Masters champion Patrick Reed said after taking a scouting trip to Augusta before the LIV Golf Miami event. “There’s definitely some trees gone, some areas that were really, really thick and now you can see a little more through them. But the actual playability of the golf course hasn’t changed. All the trees that come into play, all the trees down the edges of the fairways ... all those are still there. All of those that are in the way.”
The remnants of the storm’s destruction was more obvious down Washington Road in Evans, Georgia, where the first two rounds of the Augusta National Women’s Amateur were played at Champions Retreat. While the course was in quality shape despite the loss of more than 1,500 trees, the perimeter woods and canal that run through the course are still littered with tangles of uprooted trees and 15-foot-high root balls just left there to let nature take its course.
Megha Ganne, making her fifth Augusta National Women’s Amateur start and third final-round appearance Saturday, revealed how what the players see between the ropes at Augusta National is different than what the patrons will notice outside them.
“I don’t think you're going to see any difference in the condition for the Masters this year.”
Fred Ridley
“The only thing I noticed is that the trees look different on 3,” she said of the short par-4 third at Augusta. “I was like, ‘Oh, are there trees gone?’ The caddie was like ‘yes, but they put ones in to make it harder.’ Other than that, I didn’t notice too much. It looks pretty identical to me.”
Mother Nature taketh away, but she also giveth. An old-fashioned winter in Georgia extended longer than recent trends and kept the azalea blooms at bay long enough for the once-familiar splashes of color to adorn Amen Corner and the hillsides around the sixth and 16th holes. More often than not in recent years as climate changes, the trademark azaleas were spent before the Masters ever started.
The culling of the canopy provides a healthy restoration to the natural order of things on a golf course that some might argue had grown a little too overcrowded with trees as it prepares for the 89th edition of the Masters.
As club chairman Fred Ridley said in January, Augusta National is “Masters ready.”
“As far as the impact, the long-term impact, we have not quite as many trees as we did a year ago,” Ridley said ahead of the 2025 Latin America Amateur Championship. “As far as the golf course goes, it’s in spectacular condition. I think we had minor damage to the course, the playing surfaces themselves, but we were able to get that back in shape, but I don’t think you're going to see any difference in the condition for the Masters this year.”
E-MAIL scott
Top: The sixth green at Augusta National.
Logan Whitton, Augusta National