Black Desert Resort opened in the fall of 2022 on a piece of ground at the foot of Snow Canyon's Navajo sandstone, where a five-thousand-year-old basalt flow runs out across the desert north of Ivins. The course is the last completed work of Tom Weiskopf, and the routing winds through the lava fields that give the property its name — black rock cliffs and outcrops in the line of play on most of the eighteen holes.
Weiskopf's Final Course in the Lava Fields
Weiskopf, the 1973 Open Championship winner who became one of the most prolific course architects of his generation, finished the routing before his death in August 2022. The course opened that fall. From the tournament tees it stretches to 7,287 yards at par 72; from the absolute back markers used in resort marketing, 7,500. The signature piece is the lava — slot fairways carrying basalt outcrops, greens framed by black-rock buttes, the contrast between the dark stone and the red sandstone of the Snow Canyon ridgeline behind the property.
The PGA Tour in Utah for the First Time in Sixty Years
In October 2024, Black Desert hosted the inaugural Black Desert Championship, the first regular-season PGA Tour event held in Utah since the Utah Open Invitational in 1963. Matt McCarty won, three shots clear, in just his second start as a PGA Tour member. The event put the course on the national radar in a way the routing alone wouldn't have — the helicopter shots of the lava and the Navajo cliffs ran on every PGA Tour broadcast leading into FedExCup Fall.
The 2025 event continued under the new sponsor name; the resort closes mid-September through early October each year for tournament hosting and final preparations.
A New Course in an Old Golf Town
St. George has been a destination for public-access desert golf since Sand Hollow opened in 2008, and before that since Sunbrook brought twenty-seven Ted Robinson holes to the city in 1990. Black Desert is the new top of the food chain — a Tom Weiskopf course with PGA Tour pedigree, in Ivins, four miles up Snow Canyon Parkway from the Tuacahn amphitheater. Golfweek named it the #1 course in Utah on the strength of the inaugural ranking.
For visitors building a Washington County card, Black Desert is the round people fly out for and Sand Hollow is the round they pair it with. The two together — both public-access, both rim-and-cliff routings, both within a forty-minute drive of each other — are why locals say St. George has become the Palm Springs of Utah.