Chambers Bay

Chambers Bay was a sand-and-gravel quarry on Puget Sound that Pierce County bought in 1992 for $33 million. A county executive who golfed, John Ladenburg, pushed through the idea of a public course built to host the U.S. Open; critics called it Ladenburg's Folly. Robert Trent Jones Jr. designed it, 1.4 million cubic yards of sand were moved, and it opened on 23 June 2007 as a links, because the Pacific Northwest climate suits fescue as Scotland's does.

It hosted the U.S. Amateur in 2010 and the U.S. Open in 2015, eight years after opening. The course is 7,585 yards, par 72, the centrepiece of a 930-acre county park with the sound on one side and the old quarry walls on the other. It is public and walking, and the ground is hard and fast, with almost no trees on it.