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A lot of features stand out at Old Barnwell, a Brian Scheider and Blake Conant design that ranks 51st on GOLF’s list of Top 100 Courses in the U.S. Its greens are bold. Its routing is inventive. The fairways give you a wide berth but punish you for being out of position. You can play all kinds of shots on the ground and in the air. Loop it all you like. You will not get bored.

As much as the design, though, what defines Old Barnwell, an unconventional club on the outskirts of Aiken, S.C., is an abstract concept with a tangible impact.

They call it “the mission,” and everyone’s on board. Members. Staffers. Playing as a guest supports it, too.

Old Barnwell frames “the mission” in broad language: bringing people together through golf. On the face of it, that’s not a novel concept. Ideas like that get a lot of lip service in the game.

But Old Barnwell walks the talk. It takes those words and puts them into community-minded action. Central to its efforts is a youth and caddie program that provides well-paying jobs to kids of diverse backgrounds. Beyond putting money in their pockets, the program helps those kids build real-life skills and real-world connections. It fosters mentorships and offers those young loopers a chance at Evans Scholarships, which cover full tuition and housing for four years of college for high-achieving caddies with limited financial means.

At most courses, caddying is meant to be a service for the golfer. At Old Barnwell, says club founder Nick Schreiber, it’s the other way around. The caddie program exists to benefit the kid on the bag.

Schreiber, who grew up in Chicago, came to golf through caddying. But he didn’t come from an underserved background. His family was well-off. He knows he got a head start. He wants to help give others a fair shot.

On a recent visit to Aiken, GOLF spent time with Schreiber at Old Barnwell, playing a loop in the company of several of the club’s roughly 200 junior caddies. During the outing, Schreiber talked about his life in golf, a game that has given him so much and through which he is giving back. The mission extends beyond the caddie yard. Through a joint initiative with the ANNIKA Foundation, the club also supports female golfers, all recent graduates of four-year college programs, in their quest to make a living in the game, with backing that includes housing, access to Old Barnwell’s facilities and stipends to cover travel and tournament entrance fees.

The mission, Schreiber says, is a work in progress, something he expects to evolve as the club does. And Old Barnwell is growing. A second course, the Gilroy, is well underway on the property. It will welcome limited outside play, with proceeds flowing back into the philanthropic efforts that give this place its purpose.

To learn more about Old Barnwell, its mission, and the booming golf scene in Aiken, watch the video above.

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Picture this. You’re walking (on eggshells) through the Augusta National clubhouse, absorbing the ambiance, admiring the decor, when you spy a glass case with trophies in it. Except they aren’t trophies. They’re Styrofoam cups, cheeky stand-ins for the real things. 

An exhibit of that kind would never be allowed at the home of the Masters.

But 30 minutes up the road, at a club whose roots run deeper than Augusta’s, a setup just like it stands on proud display.

Palmetto Golf Club in Aiken, S.C., is a rarity in the game: an historic club for serious golfers that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It dates to 1892, making it the oldest 18-hole course in the American South and the second-oldest club in the same location in the United States after Chicago Golf Club. 

As at Augusta National, prominent names had a hand in its design. Thomas Hitchcock got Palmetto’s layout started before Herbert Leeds (of Myopia Hunt Club fame) completed the front nine. Donald Ross is said to have pitched in on irrigation, followed by Alister MacKenzie, who helped convert the greens from sand to grass even as he worked with Bobby Jones at Augusta. Modern-day contributors include Tom Doak, Rees Jones and Gil Hanse.

The course itself is not a bear. It is intimate in scale, tipping out at just over 6,600 yards, but it punches well above its weight in character and charm. Its routing is creative. Its elevation shifts are ample as are its shot-making demands. 

Palmetto’s membership runs the gamut: blue-collar locals and Tour pros alike. One of those pros is Kevin Kisner, who, after winning the 2019 WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play, earned a tribute from his home club that was right on brand. Without the actual trophy to display in the clubhouse, Palmetto head professional Brooks Blackburn got creative and mocked one up out of a Styrofoam cup, with Kisner’s name inscribed in Sharpie. Two years later, when Kisner won the Wyndham Championship, he asked Blackburn if Palmetto might honor him with another trophy.

Blackburn obliged. But, he says, “I thought it was a smaller win, so I put it on a smaller cup.” So it goes at Palmetto, where even newly minted champions aren’t above a good razzing.

GOLF.com got a good look at both of Kisner’s “trophies” on a recent visit to Palmetto that was part of a broader exploration of the golf scene in Aiken, which is both old and wonderfully new, with an explosion of contemporary courses to complement Palmetto and other local landmarks. During our time there, we toured courses with Kye Goalby, whose father, Bob, won the 1968 Masters; we followed Tour pro members as they played a money match; and we talked with Blackburn and others about a club where no one walks on eggshells, no one rides a high horse and beers are cheap at the self-service bar.

You can see it all in the video above or below.

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Like his fellow Briton James Bond, Alister MacKenzie got around, hopscotching from one global hotspot to another. His trade was architecture, not espionage, but that work too blurred international borders and left a lasting impact.

That’s true of MacKenzie’s final and most famous work, Augusta National Golf Club, a co-design with Bobby Jones that is hosting a little tournament this week.

But it also applies to a far-flung project that never even got off the ground.

The story of El Boquerón bears a whiff of design-world fable. Dreamed up by MacKenzie on behalf of a wealthy family in Argentina, the course was still in its paper-planning stages when the Depression hit. The project foundered. MacKenzie’s drawings went missing, lost for decades, only to be recovered.

Now, nearly 100 years after MacKenzie first put pencil to paper, a cap-tip to El Boquerón is rounding toward completion, not in South America but in the Sandhills of South Carolina, between Aiken and Augusta, at a high-end private club called the 21 Club.

The driving force behind it is Wes Farrell, a successful attorney with golf in his bones and music in his bloodline. His father, also Wes Farrell, was a celebrated songwriter who co-authored “Hang On Sloopy” and “Come a Little Bit Closer” and produced the music for The Partridge Family. The son, marching to his own beat, launched a juggernaut law firm and is now busy building the club of his dreams.

The 21 Club sits on rolling terrain that’s well-suited as a canvas for MacKenzie’s revived vision. To help bring it to life, Farrell has enlisted Brian Zager, an architect and computer-modeling specialist who contributed to the Lido project in Wisconsin. Unlike the Lido, the MacKenzie Course, as it is called, is not meant to be a clone. It is an interpretation: faithful to El Boquerón’s routing and spirit, but adapted to its surroundings and expanded to offer both a Golden Age yardage and a modern championship length, or a hybrid of the two.

It will eventually be joined by a second offering, the Hammer, a match-play concept designed by the firm of King Collins Dormer. This week, the 21 Club is hosting preview play for members and guests. But in the run-up to the Masters, GOLF.com got a sneak-peek, spending time with Farrell on the course as part of a broader exploration of the booming golf scene around Aiken, which has emerged as one of the most buzzed-about destinations in the game. You can learn more about the 21 Club, and the golf-rich region around it, in the videos below and above.

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Jim McNair knows he could charge more at his golf course.

“But we’re happy where we are,” he says. He means the greens fees start at $30. But he’s content with his location, too, in Aiken, S.C., just 25 minutes from Augusta, where the Masters gets underway this week. If you keep up with headlines in the game, you know that Aiken has emerged in recent years as one of the hottest golf destinations in the country, with a proliferation of exclusive enclaves.

McNair’s course is something different. He runs Aiken Golf Club, which his father purchased in 1959 and which he took over in 1985. The club itself goes back much further. Established in 1912, it began with 11 holes, built as an amenity to a hotel, and was later expanded to 18 by John Inglis, a golf professional and founding member of the PGA of America who’d worked with Donald Ross in New York.

Then the Depression hit. Hammered by the downturn, the hotel eventually shuttered and the city of Aiken stepped in to keep the course alive until Jim’s father, James Sr., a scratch player and respected teaching professional, took over. Under his watch, the course operated as Highland Park CC, a family-centric club that became a magnet for juniors and aspiring pros alike, many of whom went on to distinguished careers in the game.

When Jim inherited the operation in 1985, he understood that sentiment alone wouldn’t sustain it. Scraping by on a threadbare budget, he ran the pro shop and doubled as the superintendent. By the late 1990s, with aging infrastructure and new competition crowding the market, desperate times required a full redo.

“I realized it was now or never,” McNair says.

With help from the city, he rebuilt the course from the ground up. It reopened in 1999 as Aiken Golf Club. At its centennial in 2012, McNair was formally recognized as a co-designer alongside Ross and Inglis.

The course into which he’s poured his life tips out at less than 6,000 yards on an intimate site. Small in scale, it has an outsized personality. With doglegs that take the driver out of your hands and sloping greens defended by well-placed bunkers, it’s a strategic delight, widely recognized as one of the best values in the country and a standout in an area that GOLF recently explored in depth.

McNair’s contributions to the local golf scene extend beyond the course he owns. He also designed and built the Chalkmine, a par-three layout that serves as a practice ground for local collegiate players and a home base for First Tee programming. It’s another small-scale project with an outsize impact.

To learn more about golf in Aiken and McNair’s work in the area, check out the video above.

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Jeff Warne has no problem with private clubs. He grew up in Augusta, Ga., in the shadow of the game’s most famously exclusive grounds, and he now serves as director of golf at The Bridge, one of Long Island’s most gilded enclaves.

Warne walks comfortably in lofty circles.

But talk golf with him, and a different side emerges. On his own trips, Warne is often drawn to off-the-beaten-track courses in the UK and Ireland, where members’ dues are modest and access to the tee sheet is democratic. He adores those places as much as he appreciates the fully private kind.

Those two sides of Warne’s golf life have been taking shape on a sandy, pine-studded stretch of land in Aiken, S.C., where he is developing New Holland Golf Club, a project GOLF visited earlier this year as part of a broader look at one of the hottest golf destinations in the country.

Aiken has been having more than a moment. Anchored by historic clubs like Palmetto and Aiken Golf Club, the area has attracted amplified attention with headline arrivals like The Tree Farm, Old Barnwell and the 21 Club, all within the orbit of Augusta National, which sits some 30 minutes to the south.

New Holland, situated on rolling land across from The Tree Farm, aims to complement that constellation: a members’ club built on the British model, with a compelling course that welcomes outside play. Though an opening date has not yet been announced, the course has been routed, the playing corridors and green sites have been established and work continues pushing forward. Warne has enlisted Brian Schieder for the design, which sits gracefully on the terrain. New Holland will have a minimalist layout that will be adjoined by amenities to match: the infrastructure is meant to be modest — with a clubhouse, a locker room and a hot dog stand at the turn — stripped of the extravagant extras that ornament so many American private clubs.

Warne and his team want golf to be the focus, and the club itself to be an enticement to wider explorations of the area.

”To me, Aiken is the destination,” Warne says. “We’re just going to tap into all the great golf around it. You can get a great meal in Aiken. There’s a great bar scene. We also want to have a culture where you can play the Tree Farm in the morning and come over here in the afternoon and pay a daily fee.”

You can learn more about Warne and his hopes for New Holland — and on Aiken’s growing place on the golf map — by watching the video below. 

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Kye Goalby was in grade school when his father won the Masters, too young to fully grasp the magnitude of the feat.

He learned soon enough.

Bob Goalby’s victory in 1968 came, of course, with a lifetime Masters invite, which in turn gave rise to a gig for his son. By his late teens, the younger Goalby was caddying for his dad in the tournament. Even as the years wore on and he gave up those looping duties, he kept coming back to watch and walk the grounds. His ties to the Augusta area run deep.

In more recent years, those ties have extended to Aiken, S.C., which Goalby says has become something of a “home away from home.” That affection is due partly to Palmetto Golf Club, a historic layout whose understated atmosphere and character-rich design suit Goalby’s own laid-back sensibility, not to mention his love of great golf architecture. But his affinity for the area has a professional dimension as well. A former shaper for the likes of Tom Doak and Gil Hanse, Goalby has built a reputation as a skilled architect in his own right, and one of his credits is in Aiken.

GOLF recently spent time with Goalby in the Aiken area, tracing his fondness for the region and touring the Tree Farm, one of the standout courses in a swath of South Carolina that has become one of the hottest destinations in American golf.

Routed by Doak and designed by Goalby on behalf of Tour pro Zac Blair, the Tree Farm doesn’t clamor for attention. Then again, neither does the unassuming Goalby. Not one for chest-beating, he took a restrained approach to the project, which his collaborators shared.

“At the time we were building this, and even still today, the courses you see are trying to get Instagram photos and trying to get a dramatic look, and I was kind of sick of it,” he says. “No one cared about ratings when we were building this. Let’s not rely on a lot of flash and let the land speak.”

The result is an expansive, rumpled course that takes advantage of ample elevation shifts, draping elegantly across the terrain in ways that, in places, call to mind the broad-shouldered movement of Augusta National. The fairways are generous, but angles off the tee are essential. The greens appear serene, but they demand careful thought and a delicate touch. The bunkering is free of the flamboyant edges fashionable elsewhere, and around the greens, Goalby often dispensed with bunkers altogether, trusting the ground itself to conjure more than enough intrigue.

For more on Goalby, Tree Farm and the wealth of golf in Aiken, check out the video above.

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Even under ordinary circumstances, a tee time at Augusta National is tough to come by.

But this week and next — when the famous club is staging a big women’s amateur, followed by an invitational with a green jacket and immorality at stake — for all but a modest host of golfers, securing a booking is impossible

Which doesn’t mean the rest of us are fully out of luck when it comes to memorable golf around these parts. Roughly 30 minutes northeast of Augusta, lies Aiken, S.C., a history-rich city where golf’s roots run particularly wide and deep.

The game in Aiken dates to 1892 and the birth of Palmetto Golf Club, the oldest 18-hole course in the Southeast. Twenty years later came Aiken Golf Club, established as an 11-hole layout before expanding to 18. Both properties have a colorful past and present.

But the story of golf in Aiken is as much about what’s new as what’s old. In recent years the area has seen a remarkable proliferation of marquee courses that have made Aiken one of the country’s most buzzed-about golf destinations.

Earlier this year, GOLF.com spent a week exploring the area. What we found is a golf scene animated as much by the people as the places. We sat down with Jim McNair, who runs Aiken Golf Club as his father did before him, and who designed a par-3 course that has become home to a local First Tee chapter. We toured Tree Farm with Kye Goalby — son of 1968 Masters champion Bob — who had a major hand in its design on behalf of Tour pro Zac Blair. We looped Old Barnwell with Nick Shreiber, founder of a uniquely structured private club built around an unusually ambitious social mission. We also got early looks at two courses still taking shape: the 21 Club, inspired by a lost Alister MacKenzie course in Argentina, and New Holland, which will operate on the UK model — a membership, but with tee times set aside for outside play.

For all its growth, Aiken retains much the same allure that made it a draw for the monied classes in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It’s a rare and appealing hybrid, quaint but cosmopolitan, with horse farms rolling out beyond a downtown that moves at its own unhurried pace. That pace, though, quickens during Masters week, when many of the best courses, new and old, open their tee sheets to outside play (availability varies, so if you’re looking to peg it, check ahead).

As the year’s first major approaches, there’s good reason to head to Augusta. But whenever you make a trip to the area, Aiken is worth a detour.

Watch the full Destination Golf video to see it for yourself.

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Most of us carry cameras on the golf course these days, but that alone doesn’t make us photographers.

I certainly don’t qualify as one, and I have a large collection of photographs to prove it. I take pictures on my cellphone almost everywhere I play. Almost without exception, those snapshots fail to capture what I’m trying to convey, whether it’s the thrill of a particular moment or the enduring beauty of the grounds. A shoddy shooter, I have the rare ability to make even a stunning coastal course look no more special than a scruffy backyard muni.

And yet I know good photography when I see it, and I see it in the work of Jon Cavalier.

Cavalier is the keen-eyed photographer and architecture obsessive behind @linksgems, an Instagram account with more than 120,000 followers and a vast archive from some of the world’s most spectacular courses. It’s an ever-expanding digital storehouse that Cavalier has been building for the past 15 years. He joined me to discuss it on a recent episode of the Destination Golf podcast.

Photography is Cavalier’s passion but it’s not his profession. He earns his living as an attorney. He’s also a relative latecomer to golf. As a kid growing up in Pennsylvania, he focused on baseball, which he played at St. John’s University. His first encounter with golf came years later through a corporate outing. A few shots in, Cavalier was hooked. The challenge was alluring. So was the landscape, an aesthetic interest that surged a few rounds later when Cavalier found himself at Sleepy Hollow, the C.B. Macdonald/Seth Raynor classic in New York. He started taking pictures and never looked back.

In those early days, Cavalier knew little about private club culture. He had to learn the protocols around requesting access, on-course comportment and other subtleties of etiquette. But his naivety turned out to be an asset. One of his methods was to cold-call prestigious clubs, express his genuine interest in their architecture, and politely ask for access, which, often as not, he received.

Along the way, he refined his style. In addition to its vibrant colors and compelling composition, Cavalier’s work is defined by a signature restraint: his course images almost never include people. He thinks of himself as a landscape photographer, and not so much an artist as a documentarian of other people’s art.

Away from the fairways, two of his other great loves are Gracie and Maddie, his Labrador retrievers, both of whom make frequent cameos in his feed and have earned a devoted cult following among his loyal audience. That affection for dogs also fuels another project: an annual LinksGems calendar, proceeds from which go to animal charities. To date, Cavalier has raised more than $500,000.

He launched @linksgems at an opportune moment, just as Instagram was gaining steam and emerging as a major force in how golfers discover and discuss the game. Now, with a robust following and the game in a period of unprecedented growth, Cavalier works to document as much of it as he can, from the Golden Age classics to the wave of modern designs proliferating around the world.

He’s on the go a lot. How he balances that travel with his day job made good fodder for conversation, as did a range of other topics, including his methodology, his thoughts on what separates a memorable golf photograph from a forgettable one, and his take on the rise of drone photography and what it’s done — for better and worse — to the way we see courses. He also offered some advice for the cellphone-wielding amateurs among us. Which is to say, he offered some advice for me.

If you’ve ever stopped mid-round to fumble with your phone and wondered why the resulting image looks nothing like what you’re seeing with your own eyes, this episode is for you.

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Every year, legions of American golfers fly to the British Isles to enjoy the game the UK way—on members’ courses that open their gates to outside play. Then they wing home to the United States, where such democratic welcomes at top private clubs are vanishingly rare.

From its birth nearly two years ago, Broomsedge Golf Club has counted among the exceptions. Now it’s going further.

Late last week the club announced that Baker Thompson has come on as CEO and managing director. Thompson is no stranger to this corner of the golf world: he served as a founding member and club captain of the Lido, the highly-regarded Wisconsin club that sets aside a tranche of tee times for guests of Sand Valley just across the road. Thompson arrives with an ambitious build-out already in motion: four-bedroom cottages for members and guests and a food-and-beverage venue overlooking the course, with a second golf course to follow. Along the lines of such marquee courses as Ballybunion, North Berwick and Royal Dornoch, members and their guests will get priority but outsider will be able to book rooms and golf as well. “It felt like a great fit to be able to take Broomsedge to the next level and continue to embrace the UK/Lido model,” Thompson told Golf.com.

Situated in Rembert, S.C., on the same sandy belt that underlies Pinehurst two hours to the north, Broomsedge was built differently from the start. The driving force behind it was Mike Koprowski, an Air Force veteran who spent years as a policy analyst in Washington before pivoting to golf course design. Among his inspirations was Sand Hills, the pioneering minimalist layout in Nebraska that has long allowed non-members who have never played the course to request a tee time by writing a letter. Koprowski benefited from that policy firsthand, having gotten on the course that way with his father. After finding the Rembert site and financing its purchase with a military loan, he collaborated with architect Kyle Franz on a lay-of-the-land layout that runs across an unruly, pine-framed parcel. When Broomsedge opened in the fall of 2024, it adopted the Sand Hills stance: private, but not entirely sealed shut. Non-members could request a tee time, once.

Thompson first encountered Broomsedge on a trip south with Sand Valley co-developer Michael Keiser, and came away struck by the movement of the land and the piney terrain that framed it. Keiser is not an investor in Broomsedge but he has been a booster from the beginning and has now signed on as an advisor, a role he sees as paying forward the counsel he’s received from others, among them Sand Hills developer Dick Youngscap, Cabot co-founder Ben Cowan-Dewar, and his father, Bandon Dunes developer Mike Keiser. “Americans have always benefited overseas from the welcoming nature of clubs in the British Isles,” Keiser said. “There’s no reason that won’t work here.”

Until now, Broomsedge has operated with barebones infrastructure, including a pro shop run out of a trailer. The build-out and the club’s embrace of the British model comes at a pivotal time for Broomsedge and an interesting time in the industry. As it is in so many places, golf is booming across the Carolinas, with new courses sprouting across the sandhills and beyond. Most of the development is private. While appetite for top-tier golf is real, the access, for most players, is not. Broomsedge stands out in the balance it aims strike.

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“Rocky” is a good name for a caddie and an excellent description for the lie where my errant drive has settled.

It’s midday, midwinter on the edge of the Mojave. The sky is cobalt blue. The grass is emerald green. And everything beyond the fairway of the short par 4 I’m playing is stone-hard and black as night.

Once it was molten. Millions of years ago, volcanoes belched magma from the belly of the earth, spilling rivers of fire across what we now call southwest Utah — flows that cooled into the black lava fields that ring the desert city of St. George today. They make for arresting scenery and an awful place to miss.

My ball has come to rest in the ebony rubble, where little but a scuffed wedge or a sprained ankle awaits. Even Rocky Price, my look-on-the-bright-side looper, sees no point in trying to advance it.

“Drop one,” he says. “You can still get up and down for par.” Or blunder on to double bogey.

On the plus side, the blemish on my scorecard is outshined by the beauty of the setting. Not just the jagged, inky lava underfoot but the multicolored canvas all around. In the near distance, ruddy Red Mountain shows its blushing face, backed by the white-dusted peaks of Snow Canyon, their sharp lines cutting the horizon.

It’s golf inside a geology textbook, and if the scenery looks familiar that’s no coincidence. You may have seen it last fall, when Black Desert Resort staged the Bank of Utah Championship, which debuted in 2024 as the first PGA Tour stop in Utah in more than 60 years. A coming-out party of sorts for Black Desert, the final golf course design completed by the late Tom Weiskopf, the event also signaled something broader: St. George’s growing presence in the game.

THE CITY WAS ALREADY on the map for other reasons. Situated near the Arizona border, a two-hour drive from Las Vegas and at the gateway to Zion National Park, St. George has long been known as a magnet for two groups: outdoor recreationists and retirees. The young and restless come for the adrenaline, the silver-haired show up to slow things down. Golf happens to appeal to both. But in a region that marks time by reading lines on ancient rocks, the sport is a relatively recent arrival.

St. George got its first course in 1965, a seven-hole layout that came into being as a roadside temptation. The idea was to get travelers to stop rather than barrel straight through toward the Strip. Dixie Red Hills soon expanded to nine holes but retained its quirky traits, etched through sandstone outcrops at a city-owned facility where the dress code today leans toward denim and the clientele skews AARP. It’s one of 14 courses within a 20-mile radius in Washington County, ranging from high-end resorts and pedigreed daily-fee layouts to modest munis, all spread across a landscape shaped by forces far greater than a dozer.

Rocky fits neatly into the region’s arc of change. Born and raised in northern Utah, one of 13 kids, he moved with his wife to St. George eight years ago, drawn by warmer weather and cleaner air. Year-round golf was part of the pull too, but Rocky didn’t get out as often as he liked. He was in his 50s and had worked more than half his life as a banker when a health scare prompted him to press refresh. That was in 2023. Fifteen months later, he left Wells Fargo. Six months after that, he started looping at Black Desert.

The transition suits him. He has lost weight, shed his wristwatch and let his hair grow, tying it back in a ponytail.

“I love my new office,” he tells me as we move to the next tee. “You can’t beat the views, and it’s so much more relaxed.”

In migrating from north to south, Rocky followed a path blazed more than 150 years earlier by travelers with very different motivations. In 1861, 309 families set off from Salt Lake City, answering a call from the religious leader Brigham Young to settle this sun-scorched corner of Utah. The Civil War had erupted and Young envisioned a cotton-growing settlement in a friendly climate — a Mormon answer to the Confederacy’s stranglehold on the textile trade. His grand plan earned St. George the nickname “Utah’s Dixie,” a moniker that hasn’t aged especially well, though a bold letter D still sits on a hillside overlooking the city, looking like a radically shortened version of the Hollywood sign.

Young had a penchant for prophecies. One was a promise that St. George would become a “city of spires.” That vision was realized in the late 1800s with the construction of a temple and tabernacle, both built from rock quarried from the same slopes that flank Dixie Red Hills today.

What Young couldn’t have foreseen was everything else. In downtown St. George, the city has designated an 11-block historic district that blends contemporary commerce with trips in the wayback machine. On and around Main Street, pioneer-era buildings share blocks with art galleries, farm-to-table bistros and boutiques selling $150 overalls. A jailhouse built in the late 1800s out of black lava rock now houses an ice cream shop. At Thomas Judd’s General Store — the oldest continuously operating business in town — you can get a throwback soda from a fountain and a grape-studded chicken salad sandwich served on a croissant.

St. George is a Mormon town, but it’s not a dry town. On a late-day stroll through the historic district, I have my pick of watering holes, their taps flowing with local craft beers, their wine lists stocked with homegrown petite sirah and cabernet sauvignon. The hills here are alive with many things. I hadn’t known that vineyards were among them.

Brigham Young’s winter home still stands downtown as well, preserved as a museum. A brochure for a self-guided walking tour refers to its original inhabitant as “St. George’s first snowbird.” It’s an apt description for a man whose seasonal retreats from Salt Lake City’s bitter cold presaged the exodus of cold-climate transplants who have since flocked here, trading ice storms for tee times. St. George has swelled to accommodate them. A population that stood at 5,000 in the 1950s now tops 100,000. What was once considered an inhospitable patch of desert — too hot, too remote, too austere — is now one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country, with a real estate market to match. The key, it turned out, wasn’t cotton. It was recreation.

Of the area’s outdoor sports, golf is the biggest economic engine. Momentum behind it surged in the 1990s, when courses like Sky Mountain — with its postcard views of Zion — and Entrada arrived in quick succession. The latter, a private club originally designed by Johnny Miller and later renovated by David McLay Kidd, boosted the area’s bona fides. Coral Canyon followed, its holes flanked by arroyos and rock walls that blaze orange in afternoon light. Other headliners have taken shape more recently, including Copper Rock, now a stop on the Epson Tour and host of the 2024 and 2025 LPGA Legends Championship. But the course that first gave St. George a national golf profile was Sand Hollow, a John Fought and Andy Staples design that opened in 2008 alongside a state park of the same name. It has since become a fixture on Top 100 lists (including GOLF’s Top 100 You Can Play in the U.S.) and the star of countless photo spreads and Instagram posts.

IT’S EASY TO SEE WHY influencers love Sand Hollow. A massive red rock outcrop looms beside the pro shop and the first tee, which tumbles downhill, a gentle warm-up for what’s ahead. The front nine is the mellower half, with big, sweeping fairways and plenty of red rock scenery but also houses framing the holes. The back nine, by contrast, is entirely undeveloped, which underscores the drama of its arresting holes. Greens nestle into red rock amphitheaters. Fairways curl along sheer bluffs, dizzying drops that make me think of Wile E. Coyote crashing-landing in a cloud of dust.

Rocky’s with me for this round — not carrying my bag but playing alongside. He golfs every chance he gets. He also seems to know everyone we see: the head pro, the superintendent, the guy filling divots on the 14th tee. As we make our way up the final hole, we bump into a foursome unloading their bags. The group includes Gifford Nielsen, former quarterback for the Houston Oilers who went on to a career as a broadcaster and to a leadership role in the Church of Latter-day Saints. I don’t recognize him but Rocky does. The two embrace. Of course, they’re friends.

Like Rocky, Nielsen has roots farther north in Utah but now calls St. George home. “I’ve played a lot of desert golf around the southwest area, but this is just different,” he tells me later. “You don’t get scenery like this in Scottsdale or Palm Springs.”

There are other ways to experience the landscape: on foot, by bike, or from the basket of a hot-air balloon. You can rappel into slot canyons, kayak rivers and reservoirs, or do what any sensible person does when confronted with miles of dunes and granted access to an ATV.

“How’s this for a course to play on?” Jason Reeves asks me. It’s early morning, in teeth-chattering cold that’s typical of winter in the desert, where it takes a few hours for the sun to do its work. We’re on Sand Mountain, and Reeves is my guide with Mad Moose Tours for a two-hour tour on a vast expanse that could pass for planet Tatooine. The sand glows burnt ocher in the early light. Alien rock formations rise from the dunes.

Reeves is an off-road guy in all seasons, a ski instructor who also races ATVs. Time was when he did a lot of motorbike racing too, until a bad collision recast his relationship with speed.

“There’s a saying in off-roading,” he says, patting the roll bar of his Polaris. “With age comes a cage.”

I’m happy to have that protection on our tour, which pivots from pedal-to-the-metal runs along snaking rutted paths to slow rock-crawling climbs over terraced sandstone, up slopes I’m certain will be too steep to summit, through channels in the rock that look too narrow to pass.

It’s exhilarating. But nothing we traverse compares to what lies 30 minutes north. The entrance to Zion National Park is there, and on a clear winter afternoon I drive a scenic route into the canyon, retracing in reverse the patient work of the Virgin River, which, over epochs, carved these sheer, soaring walls and still courses along the canyon floor. Without summer’s crowds, Zion’s grandeur only grows, along with the sense of perspective it imparts. How small we are in the big picture, how silly it is to fret about our score.

It’s a thought that lingers the next morning when I tee it up at Dixie Red Hills. It’s a modest operation — $27 for nine holes — and the price is only part of its popularity. There’s also its winning personality: classic muni golf, unfussy and authentic. No bag drop, no starter, just a pro shop P.A. system to announce the next group. Tee times get snatched up as soon as they’re released.

I’m paired with a couple of old pals, Sid and Jerry, both in blue jeans, both of the Greatest Generation. Sid wears a bucket hat that reads “Been there, done that, can’t remember.” What I won’t forget is the 7-wood he smacks from 68 yards to birdie range on a par 3 that plays over a dry riverbed. I tip my own non-bucket hat in tribute.

Back at Black Desert, the landscape commands a different kind of respect. A tournament-level test that accommodates resort play with an assortment of tees, the course was built with the brute force of dynamite blasts in places but also with artful choreography. The routing works through the compass to showcase the panoramas, bringing lava fields and ridges into play in ways both scenic and strategic.

I’ve read enough about the place to pick up some facts. I’m aware, for instance, that Snow Canyon State Park, just across the road, was where portions of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were filmed. I’ve also learned that Jay Don Blake, a St. George native who spent years on the PGA Tour — remember the Sansabelts and the ’70s ’stache? — practices regularly on property. He was given a special exemption into the Utah Championship. He missed the cut but made a lot of people’s day.

Black Desert is big-time golf, and ownership has talked of adding more of it on nearby reservation land. But for now the course is all that I can handle.

It’s late afternoon as our round winds down, the sun painting the landscape in shades of rust and amber. Rocky and I are moving up the 18th fairway. He’s reflecting on his new life and the liberating feeling of being unburdened of what used to weigh him down. I realize I’m doing something of the same—not dwelling on the double at the 2nd or the three-putt on the 10th, or…why take inventory? I’m pushing forward, soaking up the splendor. Out here, where Rocky has found his reset and the landscape puts poor shots in proper context, the only reason to look back is to enjoy the view.

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