Sahalee Country Club South/North

Many 100 Greatest courses began as open fields, then had decades of green-committees plant trees to frame fairways; many of those same clubs are now clear-cutting such trees to open up vistas and invite more sunlight and air to greens. Sahalee is no such a club. Its course was carved from a Pacific Northwest forest of cedar, spruce, fir and pine, and its dominant theme has always been narrow fairways framed by towering trees that reach to the heavens. To strip Sahalee of its trees would be to shave Samson of his locks, so when Rees Jones and Steve Weisser began a 2022 renovation of the famed North/South nines where the 1998 PGA Championship and 2016 and 2024 KPMG Women’s PGA Championships were held (Jones had previously remodeled the course in 1996), they were calculated in their approach to thinning the forest growth. Gradually they pared back the treeline to better expose the site’s topography. They were able to expand fairways to enhance shot options and took out individual trees that had come to interfere with strategic angless into greens. What players may notice most are the new bunkers, each rebuilt, reshaped and repositioned to better engage with landing areas and putting surface hole locations. Sahalee seems at once refreshed while being absolutely the same carved-from-the-woods course it’s always been.