UNIVERSITY PLACE, Wash. – Among the many distinctive aspects of this week’s U.S. Open at Chambers Bay is that this unique, links-style golf course is the first reclaimed mining site used for the national championship. It thereby heads the list of a pretty impressive collection of courses built as part of land reclamation.
Chambers Bay sits on a gravel pit that supplied the stone for most of downtown Seattle construction as well as the undergirding of the local stretch of Interstate 5. Mining took place here for nearly a century, then was halted in 2003 after Pierce County, which had bought the land a decade earlier, began to convert the 930-acre site into a multipurpose public park and wastewater-treatment facility.