Pine Needles is the Donald Ross course you can actually play. Ten minutes east of the village in Southern Pines, it opened in 1928 — Ross at the peak of his Sandhills run — and has stayed in the same family since Peggy Kirk Bell and her husband Bullet bought it in 1953. Peggy was a Curtis Cup player and one of the founding members of the LPGA; the resort she built around the course made it the East Coast's home for women's golf for half a century. The US Women's Open has been contested here four times — 1996, 2001, 2007, and 2022 — and the Kyle Franz restoration in 2018 stripped the course back to its Ross bones: wider corridors, restored sandscapes, expanded green perimeters that recovered the pin positions Ross had drawn in. The current routing is fairer than No. 2 (no famous crowned-green nightmare) but the genre is the same — find the right side of the fairway, then thread the right side of the green.