Black Desert Resort

Black Desert Resort, in Ivins near St. George, opened its golf course in May 2023 as the final design of Tom Weiskopf, who died of cancer in August 2022 before seeing the course completed; lead associate architect Phil Smith carried the design through to completion. Weiskopf and Smith routed the 7,421-yard layout through striking black basalt lava rock with unusually wide fairways (70-100 yards in places), producing a visually dramatic course that quickly became a serious competitive venue: it hosted the inaugural Black Desert Championship on the PGA Tour in 2024 (part of the FedEx Cup Fall series, won by Matt McCarty for his first Tour victory), and the event has continued as the Bank of Utah Championship since Bank of Utah became title sponsor for 2025. The LPGA also brought its own Black Desert Championship to the venue in 2025, won by Haeran Ryu -- giving the resort a rare two-tour major-circuit hosting record within its first two years of operation.

This is precisely the kind of national-significance evidence the qualification standard's destination-exception path calls for, distinct from prestige or fame alone. What makes Black Desert a genuinely harder adjudication than a typical PGA Tour venue is its real, in-progress residential program: developer Reef Capital Partners' buildout plan calls for 1,050 total residences and 32 single-family estate lots alongside the resort's hotel and commercial space, and the resort's own real-estate materials describe a Black Desert Club membership offered exclusively to property owners. That is a direct, documented residential-relevance signal beyond tournament hosting -- but this research also found a genuine conflict in how that club program is described: one resort page frames ownership as including membership, while another, more specific page describes a homesite purchase as conferring only 'the right to join an exclusive new club offering in development.' Rather than picking a reading, this record treats Black Desert primarily as a destination_exception grounded in its verified, sustained major-tour hosting record, and flags the still-maturing ownership/membership mechanic as an open item for buyers to confirm directly.

General public and resort-guest golf access to the Black Desert Course exists independently of the ownership-linked club program, booked through Troon; buyers should not assume that owning property here changes those baseline public-access mechanics without confirming the specific, and still-developing, terms of Black Desert Club membership.