Great Summer Golf Destinations in the Pacific Northwest
A pilgrimage to Bandon Dunes is non-negotiable. Put it on the list, book the trip, and don’t look at your credit card statement until you absolutely have to. But even the greatest albums have a B-side, and the golfers who never flip the record on the Pacific Northwest are missing some of the region’s best tracks. Because this corner of the U.S. and British Columbia is wildly varied and criminally underrated.
When the gray skies finally burn off sometime around June, what emerges is one of the most geographically dramatic stretches of golf on the continent. The golfers who know it call it the best three months in North American golf. These destinations prove them right.
Chambers Bay—University Place, Wash.
Perched above Puget Sound on the site of a former sand-and-gravel quarry, the Robert Trent Jones II-designed course at Chambers Bay—host of the 2015 U.S. Open won by Jordan Spieth—remains open to anyone willing to walk, despite its championship pedigree.
And you will walk. Carts are not permitted, which is either a plus or a warning depending on your disposition. But the course’s famous verticality—multi-tiered fairways, dune-capped ridgelines, holes that plunge toward the water and climb back out—is best experienced on foot anyway, where the scale registers properly. From certain tees, you can see the snow-capped Olympic Mountains across the Sound. The lone tree on the entire property has become something of a landmark, too.
