Chambers Bay’s Lone Fir is a symbol of survival

UNIVERSITY PLACE, Wash. — Find your way out of the former gravel pit that is now U.S. Open host Chambers Bay and you’ll find yourself shrouded in the shade of a million conifers. They’re everywhere. You can’t miss them.

But if you look around the Puget Sound-adjacent course, you’ll find just one: the Lone Fir.

The 40-foot-tall tree sits just to the right of the back tee box on the par-4 16th. It’s not in play, and it almost didn’t make the cut when Chambers was built. Architect Robert Trent Jones Jr. wanted to bulldoze is as part of shaping a tired parcel of land into a distinctive American links. After all, a links course simply cannot have a tree. Not one. However, then-Pierce County executive John Ladenburg, the man whose vision conceived this course’s construction, pushed back. This is tree-hugger country, so the fir had to remain.

Jones kept the tree. It had managed to remain after the rest of the land had been gouged of any value. It deserved to stay. It almost didn’t last a year after the course opened.

In 2008, someone rode on a jet ski to the shore of Chambers Bay from the Sound. They got onto the newly opened course and climbed up the embankment, over the train tracks, to the Lone Fir. In between swigs of beer, the intoxicated man tried to chop down the Lone Fir. The man managed to make an 8-inch wound in the tree with all his ax work. It seemed like a mortal wound.

Then there was the flood of support to save the tree. After a lot of thinking and some debate if the tree was even worth saving, a treatment was devised. An epoxy was inserted into the gap and iron bars attached vertically along the gash. The Band-Aid approach worked.

Chambers Bay would be beautiful without the tree. It would be a “pure” links. However, the tree and its against-the-odds survival story has come to make the Lone Fir the iconic spot on the course. It has managed to outlast the industrial age and seen the land shaped into a championship venue. Now, after all so many years of just hanging on, it has the best view of the history about to unfold in its shadow.

Ryan Ballengee is a Yahoo Sports contributor. Find him on Facebook and Twitter.

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