Black Desert Resort is gearing up for PGA visit – Deseret News

“I think we’re lost,” says Ashley Dove as she looks for an opening that will take us back to street level.

“Did I take a wrong turn? Do you know where we are?” she asks Luke Gwilliam, the security guard who is accompanying us.

“Nope,” he replies, “this is only my second day.”

So where are we? In a coal mine? In a cave in Thailand? In the catacombs of Paris?

Not even close. We are in Ivins, the small town northwest of St. George, and are given a tour of the Black Desert Resort.

You may have heard of Black Desert. The tournament has been getting a lot of attention lately because it secured the rights to host a PGA golf tournament this fall. It will be the first time the tour has come to Utah since 1963. Not only that, but next year Black Desert is also slated to host an LPGA event, something that has never happened in Utah before.

All of this will take place on the Tom Weiskopf/Phil Smith designed championship golf course, carved from the black lava rock that is ubiquitous in this corner of the desert. The course has been finished and playable for just over a year – enough time to receive reviews like “Wow!” and “Spectacular!” and, most commonly, “One of a kind.”

There are many golf courses in the world, but few, if any, are carved out of lava.

When PGA Tour officials came to Ivins last year to meet with developer Patrick Manning, the visionary behind transforming a lunar landscape into a golf resort, and to tour the course, they took one look at the green grass, blue lakes, white sand bunkers and black basalt rock and were immediately impressed.

“They said this place is going to be a smash hit on TV,” says Ashley, Black Desert's marketing and communications director. “The world is going to see scenes they've never seen before.”

But that won't be until October; right now we're just trying to find the pro shop.

We wandered through an underground parking garage that stretched out to the horizon in all directions. For all I knew, we could already be in Nevada.

There's enough space to park at least 3,000 cars, Ashley reports. But there are no cars parked right now, and that's because the parking garage, like almost everything else in Black Desert except the golf course, isn't finished yet.

“We’re getting a lot of moving parts ready for the PGA event,” Ashley says euphemistically as she finally finds the stairs that will take us to the next level.

Despite the unpainted plasterboard, scaffolding and cabinets lying around on the floor, Ashley assures us that the plan is for most of the so-called resort center to be completed by the time the golfers – and the TV cameras – arrive in the second week of October.

That's no small goal for a building that includes 4,190 square meters of meeting and conference space, a 1,390 square meter spa and a 2,190 square meter pro shop.

In addition, there are plans to complete enough condominiums and hotel units to accommodate some of the professional golfers, PGA staff and broadcast teams.

When completed, Black Desert will have 800 “keys,” Ashley says, counting hotel rooms and condos, making it by far the largest resort hotel in southern Utah and one of the largest in all of Utah, rivaling Snowbird with its 882 rooms.

The finished resort, which will cost a total of $2 billion, will include Boardwalk Village, a pedestrian promenade with numerous restaurants and shops. However, this project is not expected to be completed for another two years.

And all this in a lava field. The pioneers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who settled here 165 years ago did not know how to get their wagons across.

Ashley acknowledges that the rapid growth is not universally welcomed. Some residents of Ivins, a town that for years had fewer than 2,000 residents, may be skeptical of a project that, once fully completed, will house more than that many people alone.

But Patrick Manning's intention is to enhance not only Ivins, but the entire St. George region by providing a gathering place the likes of which has never existed in the area before, she notes.

There will also be a lot of new employees. Ashley estimates that the resort will employ over 1,000 people at full capacity. Almost 400 have already been hired to prepare for the golf tournament.

Ashley looks at the black and green landscape outside the unfinished pro shop window and muses: “I never thought it was the perfect place for a resort, but Patrick does. He sees things. I don't think anyone believed him at first; it looks uninhabitable.”

The tour is over and Ashley leads Luke and me to the stairs that previously brought us into the daylight.

“We're going back through the garage,” she says. “This time I won't get lost. They haven't had to send out a search party for me yet.”