Chambers Bay Review

Chambers Bay is the most dramatic piece of ground in American public golf and the least loved great site in the country, and both of those are earned. Jones laid it out through the terraces of an old sand and gravel quarry above Puget Sound, with enormous elevation change, blind shots, vast waste areas and a single fir tree used as an aiming point. Walk it on a clear afternoon and it is thrilling.

Then the national open arrived, the fescue greens were contaminated with poa and baked by an unusual dry spell, and they putted so badly that the best players in the world said so into every microphone offered to them. The course later closed for five months and converted the greens to poa annua. They roll properly now, which fixes the thing everyone remembers and fixes nothing else.

The walk is brutal, several holes are blind in ways that feel arbitrary on a first visit, and the scale of the property makes a round long and physically expensive. It is walking only, push carts included, so the walk is not something a visitor can opt out of. Scenery is superb, with trains running the shoreline below and the Sound open beyond it. At the peak nonresident rate it asks resort money for a municipal experience, which is where the value grade goes. See it, but know what you are buying.