A creek that runs down the Duluth hillside was, until recently, being cooked on its way through a golf course.
Buckingham Creek was historically the coldest trout stream in the city, which in a place defined by cold water flowing off a steep basalt hillside into Lake Superior is a meaningful distinction. Its route took it through the irrigation pond at Enger Park Golf Course, and a pond in July does what ponds do: it holds still water in the sun. By the time the creek came out the far side, the water was warmer than brook trout can survive. Everything downstream of that pond lost its trout.
That has now been undone. The city and its partners have completed a $1.3 million restoration that rebuilt more than two-thirds of a mile of the creek and its tributaries as a meandering channel over rock and woody debris, through a floodplain replanted with native species and bypassing the ponds entirely. Six new bridges replaced culverts that had blocked fish from moving upstream. More than a thousand trees went in.
Alongside it, and much larger in dollar terms, the course's irrigation system was replaced. The old one dated to 1988. The new one uses high-density polyethylene lines carrying a 50-year warranty and a modern control system, and it draws city water rather than pulling from the creeks. That project ran $6 million.
Funding came through a partnership of the City of Duluth, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the South St. Louis Soil and Water Conservation District, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Mayor Roger Reinert's framing at the completion was that the ecologically correct choice turned out to be the financially correct one, which is the argument every stormwater and stream project in this city has to make and the one that is usually true here.
Why the two projects belong together
They read as separate line items and they are not.
A golf course irrigating from creeks in a watershed like this one is competing directly with the resource. A course whose water is warmed in an open pond is degrading it. Replacing the intake with city water and taking the creek out of the pond are the same decision approached from two directions, and doing them at the same time is the reason the total came to $7.3 million rather than $7.3 million spread across a decade of separate arguments.
The 1988 irrigation system was also, by any normal standard, finished. Thirty-eight years is past the service life of buried irrigation, and the failure mode of an old system is not a dramatic break but a slow rise in water use and repair costs that never quite justifies a capital request in any single year.
The contrast nobody is stating out loud
Duluth had two municipal golf courses. It now has one.
The former Lester Park Golf Course on the east side closed in 2019, and the city has spent the years since moving 267 acres of it toward redevelopment: a conveyance to the Duluth Economic Development Authority, a land use study, a draft concept placing 700 to 900 homes on the lowest ground, a citizen petition drive and a court ruling this month that kept the question off the November ballot.
Enger, in the same period, received $7.3 million of investment.
Whatever one thinks of either decision, together they are a clear statement of municipal intent. Duluth is not exiting the golf business. It concluded it could support one course rather than two, kept the one on the hillside above downtown, and put real money into making it durable. Anyone who has been told the city is quietly winding down public golf can stop worrying about Enger specifically.
What this means for the hillside neighborhoods
Enger Park sits above Lincoln Park and Piedmont, below Duluth Heights, on the Skyline Parkway corridor with Enger Tower and the Japanese garden a short walk from the first tee. It is one of the two or three best pieces of public ground in the city, and the golf course is only part of it.
For households in Piedmont, Duluth Heights, Kenwood and the upper reaches of Lincoln Park, the practical effects are three.
A restored cold-water creek is an amenity that appreciates. Duluth's identity is built on the trout streams that come off the hillside, and a restored reach of the coldest of them, with fish passage reopened, is a permanent improvement to the ravine corridor that runs through this part of the city.
Stormwater behaves better. A rebuilt floodplain with a meandering channel and native plantings is designed to absorb high water rather than accelerate it. In a city that has repeatedly watched hillside creeks tear out infrastructure during heavy rain, the downstream benefit of that is not theoretical.
The course is not going anywhere. For anyone who bought near Enger partly for the open ground, the last five years of Lester Park news made that a reasonable worry. Seven point three million dollars is the answer.
Reported from Duluth News Tribune coverage, South St. Louis Soil and Water Conservation District project materials, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources information, and City of Duluth parks records.