Played on a Saturday afternoon, 3/20/10, on a warm, sunny day with only light breezes – a gorgeous day for golf in southern Utah. Sand Hollow Resort is new in Hurricane – the Resort opened for golf la... Continue »

Played on a Saturday afternoon, 3/20/10, on a warm, sunny day with only light breezes – a gorgeous day for golf in southern Utah. Sand Hollow Resort is new in Hurricane – the Resort opened for golf last year and has two courses – the Championship and the Links (9 holes). The facility has a large driving range, small putting green, and an 18-hole putting course which, we were told, is not indicative of the course. Service is in a trailer right now – the clubhouse is under construction.

The Championship opened last year and fairways and greens are very firm, smooth and fast. The front nine is fairly flat and plays around some gnarly rock formations – homes are adjacent to some holes (but well off the line of play) with more to come when the economy gets going again. The back nine features several holes hanging on red rock cliff walls overlooking the Virgin River, and are pretty spectacular – these ‘cliff’ holes are fairly narrow and play to perched and sheltered greens with severe penalties for missing fairways or greens.

The entire area is built on a fine-grained red sandstone, so bunker sand is red and coloring differences with the multi-colored cliffs and green grasses are striking. The area is occasionally very windy, and we saw several areas where the fine portion of the bunker sand had blown out of the bunker and covered the nearby fairway – this made the bunker itself hard and crusty to play from. Fairways were thin but in pretty good shape and we normally got good lies.

Service is in a trailer right now – the clubhouse is under construction. Some golf attire is available, and a snack bar is in the trailer. Currently only outhouses are available around the course itself – I didn’t see any bathroom facilities under construction. They were busy enough on a Saturday afternoon that each group going off was waiting for carts to come in from earlier players. Cart girl came by several times, and there are watering stations on the course, but by 4PM we found some of the coolers empty. With the desert surrounding every hole and doom over the cliffs on the back, play was slow and the round took 5+ hours. They had a very reasonable weekend twilight rate of $65, including the cart with a good GPS (ProLink) and some sprinkler heads are marked, but there’s no yardage book.

Recommended, especially after it’s warmed up a little and the course has hit its stride.