The Black Desert Championship is the youngest event on this list. It debuted in October 2024 as the first PGA Tour event held in Utah in over six decades, played on the Black Desert Resort course in Ivins — a Tom Weiskopf design routed through the lava-flow basalt and Navajo sandstone of Padre Canyon, four miles up Snow Canyon Parkway from Ivins. The tournament is a FedEx Cup Fall event: not a major, not a Signature Event, but a full-purse PGA Tour stop that puts the world's top professional golfers on the same course locals can play the week before and the week after.
The Course
Black Desert is the culmination of a decades-long masterplan that turned a private undeveloped corner of Padre Canyon into a destination resort with a championship course at its center. Tom Weiskopf, who designed it, died before the course opened; Phil Smith — Weiskopf's longtime design partner — finished the build. The routing threads through black basalt lava flows and red sandstone outcrops in alternating turns, with the Pine Valley Mountain backdrop visible from most holes. Yardage from the championship tees runs over 7,300. The course's reputation is that the lava and sandstone framing makes the visual lines unusual — the rock palette is closer to a Tucson or Paradise Valley course than the green-grass-and-water look of the standard PGA Tour stop.
What a PGA Tour Event Looks Like in Ivins
The tournament week takes over the resort and the surrounding Snow Canyon Parkway corridor. Pro-am days are Tuesday–Wednesday, four competitive rounds Thursday–Sunday. The galleries are smaller than at majors but global broadcast is full — ESPN, the Golf Channel, and the worldwide PGA Tour broadcast feed all set up. Local hotels in Ivins, St. George, and Hurricane fill with players, caddies, media, and out-of-state spectators. The event is one of the largest single-week tourism injections of the fall, on the same calendar arc as the Senior Games and the St. George Marathon.
The First Utah PGA Tour Event in 60+ Years
Utah has long been a golf state — Sand Hollow, Sunbrook, Coral Canyon, Bloomington Country Club, the Ledges all draw destination play — but the PGA Tour itself hadn't run a full event in Utah since the early 1960s. The Black Desert Championship is the return of that calendar slot. Whether it stays on the schedule long-term depends on the FedEx Cup Fall structure (which the Tour has been actively reshaping) and on the resort's continued investment. For now it's the newest, glossiest event in the 435 — and a meaningful counterweight to the city's long-standing identity as endurance-sports central.