Inevitably, sand moves around in bunkers due to weather, play and routine maintenance. Steeply flashed faces get thin and the bottoms get too deep. Or bunkers that see a lot of play and sand splash can run light on sand everywhere if they aren’t replenished regularly. Maintaining proper sand depths is critical to ensuring bunkers perform as well as they can. However, continuously checking depths is a tedious and often overlooked job. If there was only a way to easily monitor sand depths without having to get into the bunker and use a probe…

I recently saw an ingenious way to do just that. Trail or stake chasers are metal stakes with colored plastic whiskers on top of them. These can be installed in the floor of a bunker and trimmed to a height that will give you a visual clue that sand depths are getting too shallow. If trail chasers are installed throughout the bunker, verifying sand depths is as easy as looking for the colored whiskers. If you see whiskers, it's time to move sand.