St. George, Utah Golf Courses

Washington County has 14 golf courses inside a thirty-minute drive of downtown St. George, and the range is unusual for a metropolitan area this size: a PGA Tour venue built through a lava flow, a clifftop resort course ranked among the best public golf in America, six city-owned tracks that residents play year round, and two private clubs. Nearly all of them stay open every month of the year.

The table below compares every course on the facts that decide where you play — length, par, difficulty and who is allowed on. Course and slope ratings are from the men's back tees.

Who can play where

Access is the first thing to settle, because two of the county's strongest courses cannot be booked at all without a member. 12 of the 14 courses take public tee times in some form.

Resort courses

Attached to a resort and open to the public as well as to staying guests. These are the destination rounds visitors plan a trip around.

• Black Desert Resort Golf Club
• Sand Hollow Golf Club

Public daily-fee courses

Privately owned but open to anyone who books a tee time, with no membership and no resort stay required.

• Copper Rock Golf Course
• Coral Canyon Golf Course
• The Ledges Golf Club

Municipal courses

Owned and operated by St. George, Washington City or Hurricane, and open to public play. This is the backbone of everyday golf in the county and the reason a resident can play year round without a membership.

• Dixie Red Hills Golf Course
• Green Spring Golf Course
• Sky Mountain Golf Course
• Southgate Golf Club
• St George Golf Club
• Sunbrook Golf Club

Semi-private courses

Privately owned and centered on a member community, but selling public tee times alongside member play.

• SunRiver Golf Club

Private clubs

Members and their guests only. Both are long-established and neither can be booked as a visitor without an invitation.

• Bloomington Country Club
• Entrada at Snow Canyon Country Club

Choosing by difficulty

Slope rating measures how much harder a course plays for a bogey golfer than for a scratch player, on a scale where 113 is average. It is a better guide than raw yardage, because it accounts for forced carries, elevation change and the severity of a miss. The spread across the county is wide.

The stiffest tests are Coral Canyon Golf Course (148), Copper Rock Golf Course (146), Entrada at Snow Canyon Country Club (139). These are courses to play from the correct tees rather than the back ones.

The most forgiving full rounds are Southgate Golf Club (115), The Ledges Golf Club (128), St George Golf Club (129) — a better choice for a mixed-ability group, a walking round, or the third round of a long trip.

Two courses carry no published rating here. Sources disagree on SunRiver's figures across several tee configurations, and the only rating published for the nine-hole Dixie Red Hills covers two loops as an eighteen, so neither number would mean what the column implies.

Where the courses are

The courses sit in four clusters, and the drive between the farthest two is under forty minutes. St. George itself holds the municipal core — Dixie Red Hills below the Red Hills north of downtown, Southgate on the Santa Clara River, Sunbrook on the west bench, St. George Golf Club out east, plus private Bloomington in its river bend and The Ledges up on the high ground toward Snow Canyon. Ivins, to the northwest, has Black Desert and Entrada beneath the Red Mountain. Washington, to the east, has Green Spring and Coral Canyon on the benches above the Virgin River. Hurricane, farther east on the road to Zion, has Sand Hollow, Sky Mountain and Copper Rock.

For a visiting golfer that geography matters more than it looks: basing yourself in Hurricane or Ivins rather than central St. George can cut a week's driving substantially, since the marquee courses sit at opposite ends of the valley.

When to play

St. George is one of the few places in the United States where golf is a twelve-month proposition, and that is the whole basis of the local golf economy. The city sits at about 2,860 feet in the Mojave transition zone, low and warm enough that the courses rarely close, which is why golfers drive down from Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Southern California in winter. Spring and autumn are the peak seasons and the tee sheets reflect it. Summer rounds are played early, and the elevated courses — Sky Mountain and The Ledges in particular — run noticeably cooler than the valley floor. Wind builds through the day on the exposed benches, so a morning tee time is a scoring decision as much as a comfort one.