Earlier this year, my Fried Egg Golf colleague Matt Rouches and I got to play and photograph Black Desert Resort, the site of this week’s Black Desert Championship on the PGA Tour. Completed in 2023, Black Desert is the final design of Tom Weiskopf, who died in August 2022 at the age of 79. The trail winds through lava fields near the high desert city of St. George, Utah.

To prepare for this week’s fall action, Matt and I exchanged a few paragraphs about our impressions of this newcomer to the PGA Tour routine.

Garrett: I’ll start with the obvious: television will love Black Desert. This place seems to have been built with photography, especially drone photography, in mind. The contrast of the inky lava fields against the bright green (i.e. heavily watered) fairways makes the golf course immediately legible and appealing to the eye. Then there’s the surrounding red rock foothills, with the snow-capped Pine Valley Mountains in the distance… I mean, it’s a visual feast.

If you’ve ever heard me talk about golf courses, you know I prefer a tougher, rougher look. But that’s just not the game Black Desert plays. This is premium, high-tech golf from the 21st century – a fitting opening salvo for a planned $2 billion (!) mega-resort

Mat: Black Desert is certainly as visually stunning as they come, and while you’re right that it will be a television darling, I think there are a few things that will put off the PGA Tour pros playing this week.

For starters, blindness and obscured sight lines are always present on this golf course. The rugged lava field site has some pretty dramatic elevation changes, which attracted a lot of interest for golfers, but likely posed a challenge for the architects. Holes like 2, 4, 5, 7, 11 and 14 all have an element of blindness because large lava rocks, which could not be easily moved during construction, have been cut into the fairway or obstruct the view from the tee. I’m sure high-level golfers who play for piles of money don’t like to leave everything to chance, so I suspect there will be some grumbling about the funkiness of Black Desert land.