This Tiny North Carolina Town Has Been Supplying Augusta National's Iconic White "Sand" For 40 Years

Ordinary brown sand? For The Masters? Never.

From the weight of each pimento cheese sandwich to the speed at which you can walk, every detail of The Masters tournament is carefully curated to ensure a legendary experience.

So it should come as no surprise that at Augusta National, a place as shrouded in folklore and mystique as the White House, ordinary brown sand won’t do.

And as it turns out, the shimmering white sand that makes up the Georgia golf course’s 44 bunkers isn't sand at all. It’s granulated quartz.

Known as “Spruce Pine sand” or “SP55,” this coveted bunker filler is named after the only place where it is found: the Spruce Pine Mining District in Western North Carolina. According to a 2020 Los Angeles Times feature, the iconic white “sand” Augusta has been using since 1975 is a byproduct of mining ultra-pure quartz used to create semiconductor chips for computers, phones, and other electronic devices.

CBS announcer Jim Nantz has famously compared the bunkers at Augusta National to “bowls of sugar.”

“They pop, they stand out,” Nantz told the LA Times. “Visually, they look different than everything else that you see. It just fits the rest of the motif, that it’s fantasyland for the golfer. Everything appears to be perfect.”

In addition to being a dazzling shade of white, the “sand” is also soft, preventing golf balls from burrowing.

"I’d rake it with my hand if I needed to,” Jim ‘Bones’ Mackay, Phil Mickelson’s former caddie, told Golf Digest. “It fits the place so well. It brings out the green in the grass. It plays very, very well. You don’t hear about guys complaining about lies or balls getting away from them out of the bunkers.”

The 2024 Masters Tournament begins on Monday, April 8.

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