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

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

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

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

Frosted: Black Desert is definitely visually stunning, and while you’re right that it will be a TV favorite, I think there are a few things that will put off the PGA Tour pros playing this week.

Blindness and limited visibility are common on this golf course. The rugged lava field features some pretty dramatic elevation changes, which are of great interest to golfers but likely presented some challenges for the architects. Holes such as 2, 4, 5, 7, 11 and 14 all present some degree of blindness as large ledges of lava rock, which could not be easily moved during construction, cut into the fairway or obstruct the view from the tee. I know for a fact that top golfers who play for tons of money don’t like to leave anything to chance, so I suspect there will be some grumbling about the unconventionality of the Black Desert land.