At 6:15 a.m. on a Friday in mid-October, a thick fog blankets Asheville Municipal Golf Course. An inviting glow spills from the maintenance building’s opening into the hazy darkness, amber streetlights dot the edge of the property, and the air is a crisp — though not quite cool — 60 degrees. The neighborhood is still asleep.

The building is known as Gee Gee Robinson’s Shop, in honor of Willie Robinson, who started working on the course in the early 1990s and stayed for more than 30 years. Inside, it’s cleaner and brighter than you might expect, with everything where it belongs, and the air carries the scent of fertilizer, mulch, and gasoline, the unmistakable cologne of a turf operation.

One by one, the crew pulls in, quick with a hello. Groundskeeper Amy Lane doesn’t have a long commute: She lives in the neighborhood, and her family has been in Asheville for more than 30 years. For most of that time, she says, she had no idea what happened out here before the golfers arrived.

Now she is one of the people doing it. Through the crew’s Instagram account, @ashevillemunimaintenance, she has also become the person showing everyone else. We spent four hours following along with Amy and the team.

The golf course they will set up this morning currently has only nine holes. When Hurricane Helene flooded the Swannanoa River in late September 2024, the water buried the 1927 Donald Ross layout’s front nine in mud and fallen trees while a major renovation was nearing completion. The back nine reopened about a month later and is now played twice for an 18-hole round; the front nine remains closed while its restoration moves through design.

Superintendent Matt Dierdorff comes down from his office and runs through the day with a few short directions. Fridays are a half day for the crew, so the plan is simple.

Assistant superintendent Cody Mincey cuts cups with Phil Pekoske behind him blowing off the greens. Andrew Galler has tee setup. Bo Summers mows the greens while Amy and Ace Tomkalski tend to the bunkers. Matt will hand-water the practice putting green and the greens on the 10th and 11th holes. Once the course is ready for play, everyone will regroup to water and mulch the new plantings.

That’s the briefing. The first tee time is 8 a.m., and the crew has 90 minutes to get ahead of it.

They climb into carts, headlamps on. Within minutes the lights have scattered across the course, and the steady hum of the machinery drifts through the fog.

We follow in a cart of our own. In fog this thick, the headlamp doesn’t help much, and more than once we ease off the pedal to be sure of the path ahead. Behind us, the cart tires leave dark tracks across the dew.

The first headlamp we catch up to is Amy’s, bobbing from bunker to bunker on the Sand Pro, a specialized utility vehicle built to groom and maintain (a.k.a. “spin”) sand bunkers; it’s the same machine she ran every morning for her entire first year. “Now that I’ve graduated, I can do all of the opening duties,” she says, mowing greens included.

Amy jokes that the Sand Pro is the slowest cart on the property, but today she has help, and she’s out in front. Spinning the sand every morning helps restore the bunkers to playable conditions while keeping weeds from getting a foothold. The small bunkers on 11 see so little play that the sand stays loose and the machine would dig in, she mentions, so those get raked by hand.

That job falls to Ace, her help this morning, on only his second day of bunker duty. He’s meticulous along the edges, deft with his touch, and when he finishes a bunker he sets the rake out of the line of incoming approach shots, the way Matt taught him.

Ace splits his time between the pro shop and the maintenance team during the week, and he comes from a family that has been in the area for more than a century. Golf has become his passion, and he treats it with respect: After a shift, he hurries home to trade his work clothes for coordinated golf attire before coming back to play. “You’ll never catch me out here in jeans,” he says.

At Muni he has found his tribe with a group of friends who line up for 18 holes almost every day. “Honestly, it’s the best job I’ve ever had,” he says, beaming. “It’s a playground.”

On the greens, there is nothing to aim at yet. The flags aren’t in, the playing surfaces sit under a skin of dew, and the course looks unfinished in a way golfers never see.

Three from the crew are changing that, one green at a time. Bo goes first, cutting the greens, and then Cody follows to cut a fresh cup on each one, in one of six sections, with Phil behind him blowing the clippings clear. In their wake, the smell of fresh-cut grass hangs in the damp air, sharp and almost pungent.

The hole locations move every day to spread out the foot traffic. By the time the procession reaches the next green, the one behind it has a flag and is ready for play.

The first golfers start pulling into the lot, eager to tee off. Above the course, the sun keeps trying to burn through the fog. The light grows just enough to switch off the headlamps, then another bank of fog settles in and the course goes gray again. A few neighbors walk their pets along the cart paths, trading waves with the crew as they pass.

On the 13th hole, Andrew, the newest hire, is wrestling with a backpack blower that won’t start. “The new guy always gets the worst equipment,” he jokes. Andrew sets the blower aside and turns to the tee markers. Tee positions rotate through zones every day, and this morning’s tee sheet for 13 reads “combine blue and white, zone three, back left.”

There’s finally enough light to see what he’s doing around the tee, but not the fairway through the fog, so he aims the markers from memory and sets them about eight feet apart so players can swing freely. Then he fills yesterday’s divots. “The golfers are supposed to do this, but they rarely do,” he quips.

Andrew moved here from Florida, and before he took the job he played Muni three times a week. Now he tries to get out on the course almost every day. “I’ll go out afterwards and play to see how I set it up,” he says. “I take pride in it because I play here.”

The dewsweepers — the first group of golfers — tee off on the 10th. The crew is well into the second half of the nine by now, with plenty of buffer to spare.

Bo, on the greens mower, is part of how they keep up. He’s actually the crew’s mechanic, with 27 years in the business and seven or eight of them here, and on mornings like this one he mows to help get the course open before heading back to the shop.

“Small budget, small crew means the equipment’s a little older than most courses,” he says. “Never boring.” None of the equipment is new, but all of it is cared for, even if some of it needs a few extra pulls to get started.

Cody is still cutting cups, working green to green with the same easy rhythm. He has played Muni since he was 7 and has worked here since 2017, longer than anyone on the current crew. He’s a competitive golfer, too, and most years he plays the Skyview Open in the Pro Division.

The greens were aerated about 10 days earlier, starting with a verticut through the thatch layer. “It’s basically like trimming your hair,” Cody says, and a heavy rain the weekend after helped them recover quickly.

That rain was rare. Cody calls this the toughest watering season he has worked. “I’ve hand-watered more this year than I have ever in 10 years,” he says.

Matt has spent much of the morning watering by hand, and that’s by design. Despite a dry year, he still runs the overhead sprinklers around the greens as little as possible, because keeping them on the drier side pushes their roots to grow deeper. “Nobody likes playing on soft, soggy greens,” he says.

He has been here since Commonwealth Golf Partners took over in October 2022, after eight years as head groundskeeper for the Asheville Tourists and two years at Biltmore Forest Country Club. He chooses his words carefully, the way someone does when they feel responsible for a place.

Asked how Muni compares with Biltmore Forest, he keeps his answer measured. “All of the fundamentals are the same,” he says. However, Biltmore Forest gave his crew room to chase every detail. At Muni, “sometimes you just have to overlook something,” though the crew still gets the essentials done.

Each morning, he says, comes down to a set of decisions: Get the course set up, get everything mowed that needs it, then figure out what can wait until tomorrow.

Many on the crew are still learning their equipment. “The good thing about it is nobody has any bad habits with equipment,” Matt says. “Training takes time, so you have to be patient with everybody.”

The crew’s real strength is its commitment. The whole team is dedicated and loyal, Matt says, and absences are rare. “Everybody’s enthusiastic,” he says. “They enjoy being out here.”

Asked about the day after Helene, he pauses. With cell service down, he didn’t know how bad it was until he reached the course. “It was shocking,” he says, and two years later he still gets frustrated about it, though he has come to accept that much of the recovery is out of his hands.

Something else is on Matt’s mind this morning: Muni is waiting to hear if it will be certified as an Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary, and he admits he has been checking his email about 30 times a day. “It should be soon,” he says.

(Editor’s note: The news came later that day. Asheville Muni was indeed certified as an Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary, the result of an 18-month effort. We’ll share the full story of what it took, and what it has changed on the course, in an upcoming article.)

Amy has already finished spinning the bunkers and returned to Gee Gee Robinson’s Shop to hose down the Sand Pro. She did not come to this work through a landscaping background: She managed her family’s Asheville restaurant, 828 Family Pizzeria, for many years, then ran a small business making organic candles and wood-burned goods until Helene led her down a different path.

In the weeks after the storm, Matt put out a call for volunteers to help clear fallen trees and debris from Muni’s back nine. Amy showed up, and the volunteer work turned into a full-time job — and, eventually, the Instagram account.

By now the whole crew has gathered between the 13th tee and the 14th hole, spreading mulch and watering the new plantings. The ground, once a dump pile for the course, is now lined with thousands of young plugs: Pollinator plants, sedges, little bluestem, switchgrass, elderberry, and shrubs to hold the ground where water runs through. We step carefully.

The planting is part of the Habitat Restoration Initiative, a project spurred by Friends of Asheville Muni, the all-volunteer group that funds improvements on the course and builds community around it. A grant from The FairWays Foundation pays for the work, which covers about two acres where Helene stripped away tree canopy, with the goal of bringing back trees, understory, and native meadow. Matt says work like this matters alongside the playing surfaces, because everything on the property works together.

After a month of clearing and another month of planting, the crew is still at it. Some days, Amy admits, she turns around, sees how many plugs are still waiting, and wants to cry.

“This is my job, though,” she says. “Playing in the dirt outside, making something pretty. It could be worse.”

Projects like this are a sign of how far the course has come. Two years after the storm, Matt says, the back nine is almost at the point of being maintained rather than constantly rebuilt, which leaves room for work beyond the fairways and greens.

The sun has finally broken through. The fog that hung over the course all morning is gone, and the back nine sits fully lit. The first golfers off this morning have already made it around the nine once, and several are heading out to play the loop a second time.

The golfers are playing a course that was being readied before most of them woke up: Fresh cups, set tees, smoothed sand, and freshly cut greens. Few of them will think about how it got that way.

The crew will wrap its Friday half day in another hour. For Ace and Andrew, the end of the shift is the start of something else, because most afternoons they find a way to play the course they set up that morning. Tomorrow, before sunrise, a few crew members will be back under their headlamps to do it all again, because the greens don’t take weekends off.

Matt is already looking further ahead. The front nine is still waiting on its restoration, and every year, he says, the course gets a little better. Asked what he likes most about the job, he doesn’t hesitate: “Being able to improve on what we inherit.”

Amy puts it another way. With so much going on in the world, she tries to keep things positive, on the course and on the Instagram account. “This is a small part of keeping the world beautiful that I can control.”

The @ashevillemunimaintenance Instagram account began as something small: Morning check-in stories Amy posted from the course to her personal account. “The more I worked, the more I learned how much goes on that I never knew about,” she says. Her respect for the crew members who had done this work for years made her want to show people what happens before they arrive.

She started the maintenance account on her own. The response was positive, Matt became excited about it, and before long the account became part of her job.

Much of what other golf course maintenance and turf crews post online looks the same, Amy says: Every course opens each morning, and everyone shows off their straight mow lines. She set out to make her posts relatable in a different way, putting the crew and the history of the course front and center alongside the work itself. The job can be monotonous and tough, she says, so keeping the posts light and fun is part of the point.

Other superintendents and greenskeepers have noticed. Several have reached out to thank her, telling her the account feels easygoing and refreshing, a welcome change of pace in a demanding profession.

The account also changes how golfers see the crew. Some think of maintenance as working against them, or simply in their way, Amy says, but that changes once they see the work up close. Golfers message her to say the course means even more to them now, including one who used to play Muni with his grandfather and now brings his son.

There is a second audience Amy has in mind. Turf maintenance is a male-dominated field, and she hopes that showing herself doing the work will chip away at the idea that a woman on a turf crew is unusual. “I hope other young girls or women who maybe doubt themselves in certain fields see me out here and change their mind about that a little bit,” she says.

Amy has always been drawn to work that looks hard, she says, and the harder it is, the harder she wants to push. It makes her feel mentally strong. She follows plenty of women in landscaping and turf care, and she loves seeing more of them out there.

“I feel honored to be here,” she says.

Almost every day there’s a new post or story on Instagram, another look at the work most golfers never see. Follow along at @ashevillemunimaintenance.

Special thanks to Amy Lane, Matt Dierdorff, and the Asheville Muni maintenance crew — Cody Mincey, Bo Summers, Phil Pekoske, Ace Tomkalski, and Andrew Galler — for welcoming us into their morning, answering every question, and letting us tag along in the fog. The next time you play Muni, take a second to notice their work. And if you see them out there, say thanks.