If a tree falls on the fairway of a famous golf hole, does anyone notice? They sure do.
They also note when it is replaced.
on thursday, Pebble Beach Golf Links posted photos of a new addition to her 18th hole, where a second cypress tree has been planted, replacing one that fell during a winter storm on Dec. 11, 2014. The work restores a feature that long had tricky shots and placement on the fantastic par-5 finale.
The replacement tree came from the nearby 17th hole Spyglass Hill. It now stands in the same spot once occupied by the storm-felled tree, approximately 30 feet closer to the green than its companion pine.
Ranked 15th on GOLF’s list Top 100 courses in the worldPebble Beach opened in 1919 and has evolved over its more than a century of life, undergoing subtle and significant changes. In 1997, for example, Jack Nicklaus was hired to build a new par-3 5th hole, a change that brought the hole to the edge of the bluffs overlooking Stillwater Cove.
Since 2010 alone, the course has undergone a number of additional improvements – longer fairways on the 2nd and 9th holes, restored bunkers and re-contoured greens designed to revive classic features and open up new hole locations.
The tree planting comes as Pebble fine-tunes the course ahead of the 2027 US Open, which it will host for a record seventh time.
This isn’t the first time an iconic tree has been replaced on Pebble. In 2002, an 80-foot Monterey cypress was planted near the 18th green, taken from the first hole to replace the original, which had died of pitch canker disease. That replanting—digging a giant hole, maneuvering a giant root ball into place—was something of a spectacle.
But this took place with less immediate fanfare in the pre-Instagram era.
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