Inside St. George, a beautiful and surprisingly rich golf mecca

“Rocky” is a good name for a caddie and an excellent description for the lie where my errant drive has settled.

It’s midday, midwinter on the edge of the Mojave. The sky is cobalt blue. The grass is emerald green. And everything beyond the fairway of the short par 4 I’m playing is stone-hard and black as night.

Once it was molten. Millions of years ago, volcanoes belched magma from the belly of the earth, spilling rivers of fire across what we now call southwest Utah — flows that cooled into the black lava fields that ring the desert city of St. George today. They make for arresting scenery and an awful place to miss.

My ball has come to rest in the ebony rubble, where little but a scuffed wedge or a sprained ankle awaits. Even Rocky Price, my look-on-the-bright-side looper, sees no point in trying to advance it.

“Drop one,” he says. “You can still get up and down for par.” Or blunder on to double bogey.

On the plus side, the blemish on my scorecard is outshined by the beauty of the setting. Not just the jagged, inky lava underfoot but the multicolored canvas all around. In the near distance, ruddy Red Mountain shows its blushing face, backed by the white-dusted peaks of Snow Canyon, their sharp lines cutting the horizon.

It’s golf inside a geology textbook, and if the scenery looks familiar that’s no coincidence. You may have seen it last fall, when Black Desert Resort staged the Bank of Utah Championship, which debuted in 2024 as the first PGA Tour stop in Utah in more than 60 years. A coming-out party of sorts for Black Desert, the final golf course design completed by the late Tom Weiskopf, the event also signaled something broader: St. George’s growing presence in the game.

THE CITY WAS ALREADY on the map for other reasons. Situated near the Arizona border, a two-hour drive from Las Vegas and at the gateway to Zion National Park, St. George has long been known as a magnet for two groups: outdoor recreationists and retirees. The young and restless come for the adrenaline, the silver-haired show up to slow things down. Golf happens to appeal to both. But in a region that marks time by reading lines on ancient rocks, the sport is a relatively recent arrival.

St. George got its first course in 1965, a seven-hole layout that came into being as a roadside temptation. The idea was to get travelers to stop rather than barrel straight through toward the Strip. Dixie Red Hills soon expanded to nine holes but retained its quirky traits, etched through sandstone outcrops at a city-owned facility where the dress code today leans toward denim and the clientele skews AARP. It’s one of 14 courses within a 20-mile radius in Washington County, ranging from high-end resorts and pedigreed daily-fee layouts to modest munis, all spread across a landscape shaped by forces far greater than a dozer.

Rocky fits neatly into the region’s arc of change. Born and raised in northern Utah, one of 13 kids, he moved with his wife to St. George eight years ago, drawn by warmer weather and cleaner air. Year-round golf was part of the pull too, but Rocky didn’t get out as often as he liked. He was in his 50s and had worked more than half his life as a banker when a health scare prompted him to press refresh. That was in 2023. Fifteen months later, he left Wells Fargo. Six months after that, he started looping at Black Desert.

The transition suits him. He has lost weight, shed his wristwatch and let his hair grow, tying it back in a ponytail.

“I love my new office,” he tells me as we move to the next tee. “You can’t beat the views, and it’s so much more relaxed.”

In migrating from north to south, Rocky followed a path blazed more than 150 years earlier by travelers with very different motivations. In 1861, 309 families set off from Salt Lake City, answering a call from the religious leader Brigham Young to settle this sun-scorched corner of Utah. The Civil War had erupted and Young envisioned a cotton-growing settlement in a friendly climate — a Mormon answer to the Confederacy’s stranglehold on the textile trade. His grand plan earned St. George the nickname “Utah’s Dixie,” a moniker that hasn’t aged especially well, though a bold letter D still sits on a hillside overlooking the city, looking like a radically shortened version of the Hollywood sign.

Young had a penchant for prophecies. One was a promise that St. George would become a “city of spires.” That vision was realized in the late 1800s with the construction of a temple and tabernacle, both built from rock quarried from the same slopes that flank Dixie Red Hills today.

What Young couldn’t have foreseen was everything else. In downtown St. George, the city has designated an 11-block historic district that blends contemporary commerce with trips in the wayback machine. On and around Main Street, pioneer-era buildings share blocks with art galleries, farm-to-table bistros and boutiques selling $150 overalls. A jailhouse built in the late 1800s out of black lava rock now houses an ice cream shop. At Thomas Judd’s General Store — the oldest continuously operating business in town — you can get a throwback soda from a fountain and a grape-studded chicken salad sandwich served on a croissant.

St. George is a Mormon town, but it’s not a dry town. On a late-day stroll through the historic district, I have my pick of watering holes, their taps flowing with local craft beers, their wine lists stocked with homegrown petite sirah and cabernet sauvignon. The hills here are alive with many things. I hadn’t known that vineyards were among them.

Brigham Young’s winter home still stands downtown as well, preserved as a museum. A brochure for a self-guided walking tour refers to its original inhabitant as “St. George’s first snowbird.” It’s an apt description for a man whose seasonal retreats from Salt Lake City’s bitter cold presaged the exodus of cold-climate transplants who have since flocked here, trading ice storms for tee times. St. George has swelled to accommodate them. A population that stood at 5,000 in the 1950s now tops 100,000. What was once considered an inhospitable patch of desert — too hot, too remote, too austere — is now one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country, with a real estate market to match. The key, it turned out, wasn’t cotton. It was recreation.

Of the area’s outdoor sports, golf is the biggest economic engine. Momentum behind it surged in the 1990s, when courses like Sky Mountain — with its postcard views of Zion — and Entrada arrived in quick succession. The latter, a private club originally designed by Johnny Miller and later renovated by David McLay Kidd, boosted the area’s bona fides. Coral Canyon followed, its holes flanked by arroyos and rock walls that blaze orange in afternoon light. Other headliners have taken shape more recently, including Copper Rock, now a stop on the Epson Tour and host of the 2024 and 2025 LPGA Legends Championship. But the course that first gave St. George a national golf profile was Sand Hollow, a John Fought and Andy Staples design that opened in 2008 alongside a state park of the same name. It has since become a fixture on Top 100 lists (including GOLF’s Top 100 You Can Play in the U.S.) and the star of countless photo spreads and Instagram posts.

IT’S EASY TO SEE WHY influencers love Sand Hollow. A massive red rock outcrop looms beside the pro shop and the first tee, which tumbles downhill, a gentle warm-up for what’s ahead. The front nine is the mellower half, with big, sweeping fairways and plenty of red rock scenery but also houses framing the holes. The back nine, by contrast, is entirely undeveloped, which underscores the drama of its arresting holes. Greens nestle into red rock amphitheaters. Fairways curl along sheer bluffs, dizzying drops that make me think of Wile E. Coyote crashing-landing in a cloud of dust.

Rocky’s with me for this round — not carrying my bag but playing alongside. He golfs every chance he gets. He also seems to know everyone we see: the head pro, the superintendent, the guy filling divots on the 14th tee. As we make our way up the final hole, we bump into a foursome unloading their bags. The group includes Gifford Nielsen, former quarterback for the Houston Oilers who went on to a career as a broadcaster and to a leadership role in the Church of Latter-day Saints. I don’t recognize him but Rocky does. The two embrace. Of course, they’re friends.

Like Rocky, Nielsen has roots farther north in Utah but now calls St. George home. “I’ve played a lot of desert golf around the southwest area, but this is just different,” he tells me later. “You don’t get scenery like this in Scottsdale or Palm Springs.”

There are other ways to experience the landscape: on foot, by bike, or from the basket of a hot-air balloon. You can rappel into slot canyons, kayak rivers and reservoirs, or do what any sensible person does when confronted with miles of dunes and granted access to an ATV.

“How’s this for a course to play on?” Jason Reeves asks me. It’s early morning, in teeth-chattering cold that’s typical of winter in the desert, where it takes a few hours for the sun to do its work. We’re on Sand Mountain, and Reeves is my guide with Mad Moose Tours for a two-hour tour on a vast expanse that could pass for planet Tatooine. The sand glows burnt ocher in the early light. Alien rock formations rise from the dunes.

Reeves is an off-road guy in all seasons, a ski instructor who also races ATVs. Time was when he did a lot of motorbike racing too, until a bad collision recast his relationship with speed.

“There’s a saying in off-roading,” he says, patting the roll bar of his Polaris. “With age comes a cage.”

I’m happy to have that protection on our tour, which pivots from pedal-to-the-metal runs along snaking rutted paths to slow rock-crawling climbs over terraced sandstone, up slopes I’m certain will be too steep to summit, through channels in the rock that look too narrow to pass.

It’s exhilarating. But nothing we traverse compares to what lies 30 minutes north. The entrance to Zion National Park is there, and on a clear winter afternoon I drive a scenic route into the canyon, retracing in reverse the patient work of the Virgin River, which, over epochs, carved these sheer, soaring walls and still courses along the canyon floor. Without summer’s crowds, Zion’s grandeur only grows, along with the sense of perspective it imparts. How small we are in the big picture, how silly it is to fret about our score.

It’s a thought that lingers the next morning when I tee it up at Dixie Red Hills. It’s a modest operation — $27 for nine holes — and the price is only part of its popularity. There’s also its winning personality: classic muni golf, unfussy and authentic. No bag drop, no starter, just a pro shop P.A. system to announce the next group. Tee times get snatched up as soon as they’re released.

I’m paired with a couple of old pals, Sid and Jerry, both in blue jeans, both of the Greatest Generation. Sid wears a bucket hat that reads “Been there, done that, can’t remember.” What I won’t forget is the 7-wood he smacks from 68 yards to birdie range on a par 3 that plays over a dry riverbed. I tip my own non-bucket hat in tribute.

Back at Black Desert, the landscape commands a different kind of respect. A tournament-level test that accommodates resort play with an assortment of tees, the course was built with the brute force of dynamite blasts in places but also with artful choreography. The routing works through the compass to showcase the panoramas, bringing lava fields and ridges into play in ways both scenic and strategic.

I’ve read enough about the place to pick up some facts. I’m aware, for instance, that Snow Canyon State Park, just across the road, was where portions of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were filmed. I’ve also learned that Jay Don Blake, a St. George native who spent years on the PGA Tour — remember the Sansabelts and the ’70s ’stache? — practices regularly on property. He was given a special exemption into the Utah Championship. He missed the cut but made a lot of people’s day.

Black Desert is big-time golf, and ownership has talked of adding more of it on nearby reservation land. But for now the course is all that I can handle.

It’s late afternoon as our round winds down, the sun painting the landscape in shades of rust and amber. Rocky and I are moving up the 18th fairway. He’s reflecting on his new life and the liberating feeling of being unburdened of what used to weigh him down. I realize I’m doing something of the same—not dwelling on the double at the 2nd or the three-putt on the 10th, or…why take inventory? I’m pushing forward, soaking up the splendor. Out here, where Rocky has found his reset and the landscape puts poor shots in proper context, the only reason to look back is to enjoy the view.