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 at the age of 79 in August 2022. The course rambles through lava fields near the high-desert city of St. George, Utah.

To get ready for this week’s fall-series action, Matt and I traded a few paragraphs about our impressions of this newcomer to the PGA Tour rota.

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

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

Matt: 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 some things that will turn off the PGA Tour pros playing this week.

To start, blindness and obscured sightlines are ever-present at this golf course. The rugged lava-field site has some fairly dramatic elevation changes, which create a lot of interest for golfers but likely posed some challenges to the architects. Holes like 2, 4, 5, 7, 11, and 14 all have some element of blindness because large lava-rock outcroppings, which couldn’t be easily moved during construction, cut into the fairway or obstruct the view from the tee. I know for a fact that high-level golfers playing for piles of cash don’t like to leave anthing to chance, so I suspect there will be some grumbling about the funkiness of Black Desert’s land.