Yahoo Sports Uncommon ground: New Black Desert in Utah soars into Golfweek's Best course rankings
Sunrise hits a little differently in Greater Zion. As morning light comes to life, it’s not what it does to the sky. Or to the ground. All eyes are on the towering orange cliffs between – they seem to belong to neither land nor the heavens.
The sunlight strikes the tops first, the mountains bursting in color. Time is marked quickly as illumination slides downward, casting aside the last of the night and presenting the full scope of the escarpments. Sunsets are beautiful in this patch of desert, but mornings are magical.
This all sound perhaps a little too earthy-crunchy or mystical for you? There are plenty of folks who flood the outskirts of Zion National Park looking for such moments, but this is a golf magazine, after all. Fret not. We’re getting to the good stuff.
As the shade on the mountains is lowered by the sun’s ascent, another darkness shines. The new golf course at Black Desert Resort soaks up the light, a slanted field of ebony lava laced with fairways. The contrasting palette – orange, black, green, blue – plays tricks with the eye, and the whole aesthetic is somewhat overwhelming.
Best of all: You can play it.
Despite the sea of lava, the course is very manageable, wide where it needs to be and tricky where it counts. Black Desert can accommodate a resort guest or a tour pro, which is good, because it was laid out with both in mind.
Opened in 2023, Black Desert was the last course designed by Tom Weiskopf before his death caused by pancreatic cancer. Phil Smith, Weiskopf’s partner in golf architecture, finished the job.
The layout has quickly climbed the rankings and is No. 1 in Utah on Golfweek’s Best list of public-access courses, No. 26 among all resort courses in the U.S. and No. 81 among all modern courses in the country.
And it’s all part of one the most ambitious endeavors golf has seen in decades.
Black Desert Resort will have a 148-room hotel. A village of condos focused on golfers, another focused on families. A 3,000-foot boardwalk promenade of shops, restaurants and entertainment venues. There will be a PGA Tour event this fall, an LPGA event next year – both of those come on the heels of an Epson Tour event in 2023 in which players were feted with luxuries not normally reserved for that tour.
The developer, Reef Capital Partners, wants even more: concerts, NBA exhibitions and possibly preseason games featuring the Utah Jazz, maybe the NFL’s involvement at some point. Plenty of discussions are ongoing for the resort that is scheduled to open in full later this year.
The sky appears to be the limit at Black Desert. And what a sky it is in this southwest corner of Utah.
Lava, the pros and cons
There’s nothing easy about building a golf course in a lava field. Dramatic, yes. Simple, no.
Phil Smith had seen the site before, while pursuing a job at nearby Entrada Country Club. That job went to another architect, but Smith was able to look a mile or so northwest across the landscape at the then-barren lava field. The site had been the source of speculation and investment for years, but no golf course had been built.
Lava has at times blasted and oozed out of the areas near Ivins — several of which have become national and state parks — for millions of years. The National Park Service reports that the latest volcanic eruption was 32,000 years ago from what is now Snow Canyon State Park just a couple miles north of the golf course. The site for Black Desert looks much more like something to be found in Hawaii, minus the ocean views but with plenty of promise.
When word came that new investors were ready to move on the site, Smith and Weiskopf jumped at the job. Then came the hard part.
Just surveying the site was ankle-breaking work. On several occasions Smith and Weiskopf walked the site, which was almost all lumpy and sharp lava with just a few trails.
“There were areas that were complete lava fields where you’re just going up and down and climbing, crawling,” Smith said. “Unfortunately we lost Tom a couple of times. He fell in some of those places and got bloodied up pretty good. I can say I never fell on that site, which is shocking, but I’m probably jinxing myself. Just looking for a golf ball the next time I play out there, I’ll probably crack my head open.”
Weiskopf — known as a hands-on architect who would throw himself into his course projects — was 76 years old, but he was determined to keep up.
“We started trekking, and he walked every bit of it with us,” Smith said. “I always credited Tom with his personal attention to projects, which was just not matched as far as many player-architects goes, so I was always able to get a lot of information from him as an architect working with him that was just invaluable for me.”
Knowing there would be lava in play, and knowing that the winds can reach 40 mph on the Black Desert site, Weiskopf and Smith came up with a routing that provided plenty of room to swing away. This serves two purposes: Width provides strategic options for skilled golfers choosing a route to a flag, and it also allows plenty of room to avoid the lava.
“Because we knew you’re pretty much dead outside of the turf, we wanted really wide fairways,” Smith said. “That’s why when you’re out there, you see those really super wide fairways with just a nice band of rough around them.”
There were plenty of options in choosing the routing, dozens of cool pockets that could hold a green. But they had to pick and choose among the great sites to develop the best 18 cohesive holes. Smith said he still looks around and wonders, what if?
The plans for the resort made that simpler, as Reef Capital’s directors did not intend to introduce neighborhoods or roads on the interior of the course. All the resort amenities sit on the perimeter of the layout, which gave Weiskopf and Smith room to work. There would be long views across the neighboring town and residential areas, all with incredible backdrops of desert and mountains, but Black Desert’s golf course would be constructed with the integrity of the routing in focus.
Get the routing right
“Our first priority was getting the routing right, because that’s what makes the golf course work and feel right, getting the holes where they need to be,” Smith said. “Sometimes you have owners that don’t allow that to happen. But not in this case. These guys were great.”
As was his custom, Weiskopf would draw potential holes on a legal pad after scouting the site. These would become the basis of the design and all the work that would follow.
“He would sketch the strategy … just diagrams with yardage,” Smith said. “Even when we were in the field, he could sense yardage better than anybody I’ve ever seen. I guess that’s from playing golf all those years.
“I would take those sketches and start integrating those into the topography, and then take a more detailed version of that into the grading plans. And so it was really his ideas that I put on paper and then started working with all the different consultants, civil engineers and people working on everything.”
Despite its inherent difficulty as a site, the terrain and surrounding landscapes are certainly eye candy. Using Weiskopf’s sketches, Smith would try to blend all aspects of the architecture to highlight that beauty, never detracting from what nature provided. It’s no easy task to make everything look like it belongs in a lava field.
“It’s an interesting combination, you know, golf course architecture — the reason I think I love it so much is because it’s a great combination of civil engineering skills and art skills and architecture,” Smith said. “It’s very artistic, and it has to look right and look like it flows. The key to good design, I think, is that it feels good and doesn’t hurt your eye to look at it. It has to feel right in order to play right.”
Things didn’t get any easier for the actual clearing of fairways. The team dynamited every square inch of the routing, blasting its way to more than 100 acres of what would become turf. Then the routing was capped with three feet of sand, half a million cubic yards in all that was conveniently available in a nearby site that needed to be excavated to build the resort’s parking garage.
It’s the depth of that sand capping that allows for such smooth fairways amid the lava, Smith said. The edges of each hole might be jagged, but the course itself is perfectly contoured. The sand also provides excellent drainage and the firm, bouncy conditions that are a hallmark of great courses, be they a links course in Scotland or a desert course in Utah.
Built for the pros and the amateurs
After all the lava hikes and blasting and sand capping, then came the most creative part.
Black Desert has to play as a resort course 51 weeks a year, hosting amateurs of all skill levels. The width certainly helps — my group in two rounds lost a handful of balls in the lava, as would be expected, but to be honest those sideways shots probably deserved to be lost. There’s plenty of room to play.
The other week this year, the course will host PGA Tour players in October in what has been named the Black Desert Championship, part of the Tour’s FedEx Cup Fall series of events. In May of 2025, the course will be home to an LPGA tournament of the same name.
How do you build a course that can properly challenge top-tier professionals while making sure every-day amateurs don’t brain themselves in the lava?
First off, most of the greens are large enough to offer many pin positions, Smith said. Holes can be cut to accommodate amateurs, or they can be located in more nuanced spots to challenge pros attempting to make birdies in bunches.
There is a solid mix of holes. The opener is a medium-length par 4 that introduces all the landscapes from a high point, then the layout dives into the lava. There are two drivable par 4s, Nos. 5 and 14. From the back tees the par 3s range from 151 yards to 202, including No. 17 with a rumpled but smaller green that pays homage to the Postage Stamp at Royal Troon in Scotland, where Weiskopf won the 1973 British Open.
The par-3 third hole plays downhill to a green with a bunker inside the putting surface, similar to No. 6 at Riviera in California. The par-5 seventh features islands of lava in the middle of the fairway where most players would want to lay up on their second shots, the green sitting above and to the left behind walls of lava that pinch in. The 18th is a classic risk/reward par 5, allowing players to bite off what they dare as the fairway bends left beyond desert scrub and more lava.
It’s frequently risk versus reward throughout Black Desert. Challenge the lava at the edges to gain a strategic advantage, or tack safely around it. Make great players think while providing safer passage for the rest of us.
“We certainly designed it to challenge the best players in the world,” Smith said, noting that yardage has been added to a few holes at the Tour’s request. “That’s something Tom and I did throughout our careers together. We always designed golf courses with that possibility in mind. Think about TPC Scottsdale (also designed by the pair), where one week of the year it’s got to challenge the best players in the world but 99 percent of the time, it’s a resort course. So you’ve got to be playable.
“I am just always intrigued and excited to watch Tour players play something that I’ve been a part of. It’s always the best part, not only Tour players but just watching people play and enjoy the fruits of your labors. And it’s just so rewarding to see the best in the world take a crack at it. I love it. You know, I’m sure there’s some guys that are going to shoot some low numbers, but I can’t wait to see it.”
Tom Weiskopf\'s last design
Weiskopf started treatment for his cancer just as course construction began at Black Desert. He made two site visits during construction despite his progressing illness. Smith and Weiskopf had always been a good team, Smith said, because each focused on different aspects of any build.
“Tom always said, ‘All right, Phil, I’ll be the designer and you’ll be the architect,’ ” Smith said. “And so it worked out great, because it was his visualization. He had a great memory of all the holes that he played during his days on the Tour. He had great recall of shots that he played in certain tournaments. And so he had that sort of memory bank. Jack Nicklaus (for whom Smith had previously worked as a design associate) was the same way — they both had really good photographic memories for those types of situations.
“And Tom was a great listener, and I think that’s something you have to be good at to be a good architect.
You have to understand, what are my client’s needs? And who’s going to be the user of the golf course, right? He knew it’s a hard game, so he wanted to make it fun. He created angles and different strategic elements in the golf courses that sort of trick your eye. He would do so many little subtle things that I loved.”
Weiskopf designed 73 courses in all, and Smith worked with him on more than 30 of those. It was up to Smith to complete Black Desert with Weiskopf’s plans in mind. Weiskopf – winner of 16 PGA Tour events and one major championship — passed away in November of 2022. Black Desert was completed and opened in May of 2023 in his absence.
“For it to be the last project that Tom and I got to work on together, I don’t think it could have been a more fitting finish,” Smith said. “I was able to get him out there a couple times to see some things, and he stayed up to speed with what we were doing. It was just my goal to make that man proud, and I hope that’s what we did.”
Job well done.
Golfweek\'s Best public-access courses in Utah
1. Black Desert Resort*Ivins (81m)
2. Sand Hollow (Championship)Hurricane (T154m)
3. HideoutMonticello (m)
4. Soldier Hollow (Gold)Midway (m)
5. Copper Rock*Hurricane (m)
6. Soldier Hollow (Silver)Midway (m)
7. Sunbrook (Pointe/Woodbridge)St. George (m)
8. Thanksgiving PointLehi (m)
9. Green SpringWashington (m)
T10. Coral CanyonWashington (m)
T10. The Ledges of St. GeorgeSt. George (m)
*New to or returning to list
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: New Black Desert in Utah soars into Golfweek's Best course rankings
