Black Desert Resort Golf Club

Black Desert is built inside a lava field. The Santa Clara flow left a jagged black basalt
surface across this part of Ivins, and rather than clear it, the design crews cut fairway corridors
through it and left the rock standing where it fell. The visual result is unlike anything else in
Utah: green turf, black stone and red Navajo sandstone cliffs stacked in the same sightline.

Weiskopf's last routing

This was Tom Weiskopf's 73rd and final course. He died in August 2022, before it opened, and the
work was completed by Phil Smith of Weiskopf Design. The routing is the part worth studying. Weiskopf
had a long-held preference for width and for giving the player a choice rather than a demand, and the
fairways here run 70 to 100 yards across in places. The lava does the work that rough and water do
elsewhere: it is unplayable where it sits, so the penalty for a genuinely bad shot is severe while
the ordinary miss is fine. From the Tournament tees the course rates 75.4 with a slope of 139.

Holes worth knowing

The par-five 7th is the most photographed, a three-shot hole with islands of raw lava sitting in the
middle of the fairway that force a decision on both the second and the third. The 17th is a short
hole of about 150 yards and a deliberate echo of the Postage Stamp at Royal Troon, the course where
Weiskopf won the Open Championship in 1973. Six holes bring water into play, which is a high number
for a desert course and a reminder that this is a resort layout as much as a championship one.

Tournament golf

Black Desert brought top-level professional golf to Washington County. It hosted a PGA Tour event in
2024 as the Black Desert Championship and again in 2025 as the Bank of Utah Championship, and it
staged the LPGA's inaugural Black Desert Championship in May 2025. That is a rare distinction for a
course this young and it is the clearest signal of how quickly the property was built to tour
standard.

The setting

Ivins sits at the foot of the Red Mountain, and the cliffs that fill the northern horizon here are
the same escarpment that forms the western wall of Snow Canyon State Park.
The basalt underfoot is geologically young by Utah standards, which is why it is still sharp rather
than weathered smooth. Tuacahn Amphitheatre
is a few minutes up the road in a red-rock box canyon.

Staying here

The golf course is one piece of a full resort, and it is the reason most visiting golfers now base
themselves in Ivins rather than central St. George. See our guide to
St. George resorts for how the property compares, and the
Ivins area page for what living on this side of the valley
looks like.