Sand Hollow Golf Club

Sand Hollow is the course that put southern Utah on the national golf map. John Fought routed
the Championship eighteen along the lip of a sandstone plateau east of Hurricane, and the closing
stretch runs so close to the drop that the fairway edge and the canyon edge are the same line.

The design

Fought worked in a restrained, ground-game idiom rather than a target-golf one. Fairways are broad,
greens are open across the front, and the defense is angle and wind rather than forced carries.
That combination is why the course rewards a shaped tee ball: the safe side of most fairways leaves
a poor look at a green tucked behind slickrock, and the aggressive side leaves a short iron and a
flat lie. From the Tournament tees the course rates 74.0 with a slope of 137, which is stout, but
the same routing from the Signature or Resort tees plays as one of the friendlier resort rounds in
the state. There are five sets of tees and the spread between them is unusually wide.

Holes worth knowing

The cliff sequence on the back nine is the signature. Golf Digest has placed three Sand Hollow
holes on its list of America's 100 best golf holes: the 15th, the 13th and the 12th. The 12th is
the postcard, a short hole played across open air with nothing but red rock and the reservoir
behind it, and the 15th is the one that most often decides a match, because the ideal line flirts
with the rim and the bail-out leaves a genuinely awkward recovery.

The setting

The plateau is Navajo sandstone, the same cross-bedded formation that makes up the walls of Zion,
and the iron oxide in it is what supplies the color. The reservoir below is Sand Hollow State Park;
the pale dunes on the far side are Sand Mountain. Because the course sits several hundred feet above
the valley floor, it catches wind that the town courses do not, and afternoon rounds usually play
meaningfully longer than morning ones.

Recognition

Sand Hollow's own scorecard records a run of national placements: number 54 on Golf Magazine's best
public courses in America, number 39 on Golfweek's best resort courses in America, and number 1 in
Golf Magazine's ranking of courses in Utah. The resort also operates a nine-hole Links course, a
short Wee Course and a driving range, so a stay-and-play trip does not have to be eighteen holes at
a time.

Planning a round here

Sand Hollow is the anchor of most golf itineraries in the region, and it is the course visitors book
first and everything else around. Our St. George bucket-list golf
guide puts it in context against the rest of the region's marquee rounds, and
a day at Sand Hollow covers pairing the round with the reservoir and
Sand Hollow State Park next door.

Living here

The course is the centerpiece of the Sand Hollow Resort
community, where casitas and custom lots back directly onto the golf corridor.