Spyglass Hill lives in the shadow of its more famous neighbor, but plenty of golfers who’ve played both will tell you Spyglass is the tougher test, and maybe the better course. It’s the other half of any serious Pebble Beach trip, and it deserves more than a backup-round reputation.
The History
Robert Trent Jones Sr. designed Spyglass Hill in 1966, working on land Samuel Morse provided after the Northern California Golf Association agreed to fund construction in exchange for tournament access. Jones built the course on what had been called Pebble Pines, sandy dune land bordering the ocean that gave way to dense Monterey pine forest. Morse renamed it Spyglass Hill in honor of Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived nearby in the 1870s and is believed to have drawn on the Monterey Peninsula when writing Treasure Island. True to that, nearly every hole carries a name pulled straight from the novel, starting with the par-5 1st, Treasure Island, and running through holes like Billy Bones, Black Dog, and the par-4 4th, Blind Pew, which Jones himself called his favorite par-4 he ever built.
The course joined the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am rotation in 1967, a year after opening, and has been part of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am ever since. Bing Crosby was so confident in the course that he once bet Jack Nicklaus $5 he couldn’t break par there in his first round. Nicklaus shot a 2-under 70 and still has the signed bill to prove it.
The Golf
Spyglass plays as two different courses stitched together. The opening five holes run through coastal dunes with the Pacific in view the entire time, regularly ranked among the best opening stretches in golf. From there, the course turns inland and climbs through pine forest for the remaining 13 holes, trading ocean views for tree-lined doglegs, ponds, and some of the most demanding green complexes on the Monterey Peninsula. Sports Illustrated once described it as Pine Valley meeting Augusta National, and the comparison holds up. When Spyglass hosted the 1999 U.S. Amateur, not a single player in the field broke 70.
It’s a genuinely hard course, with a slope rating in the high 140s, and it’s earned its reputation as one of the toughest rounds you’ll play on the West Coast.
Want to pair Pebble Beach with Spyglass Hill on your next California trip? Coastal Golfaway has been packaging stay-and-play golf vacations since 1986. Reach out and we’ll put it together.
