Black Desert Resort, with its signature lava, is hustling to get ready for PGA visit

IVINS, Washington County — "I think we're lost," says Ashley Dove as she searches for an opening that will get us back up 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 answers, "This is only my second day."

So where are we? A coal mine? A cave in Thailand? The catacombs of Paris?

Not even close. We are in Ivins, the little town northwest of St. George, getting a site tour of Black Desert Resort.

Maybe you've heard of Black Desert. It's gotten a lot of publicity lately for securing the rights to host a PGA golf tournament this fall, the first time the Tour has come to Utah since 1963. Not only that, next year Black Desert is scheduled to host an LPGA event, something that's never been done in Utah.

All that will take place on the Tom Weiskopf/Phil Smith-designed championship golf course cut out of the black lava rock that is ubiquitous out here in this corner of the desert. The course has been finished and playable for a little over a year — enough time to earn reviews like "Wow!" and "Spectacular!" and, most often, "Unique."

The world has a lot of golf courses, but few, if any, carved out of lava.

When reps from the PGA Tour came to Ivins last year to meet developer Patrick Manning, the visionary behind transforming a moonscape into a golf resort, and take a tour of the course, they cast one look at the green grass, blue lakes, white sand traps and black basalt rock and were instantly sold.

"They said this place is going to really pop on TV," says Dove, who is the head of Black Desert marketing and communications. "The world's going to see scenes they haven't seen before."

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

We've been wandering through an underground parking garage that stretches out to the horizon in all directions. For all I know, we could already be in Nevada.

There's enough space to park at least 3,000 cars, Dove reports. But there are zero cars parked at the moment, and that's because the parking garage, like most everything else at Black Desert other than the golf course, isn't finished.

"There's a lot of moving pieces we're getting lined up for the PGA event," is how Dove euphemistically puts it as she finally finds the stairway that will take us up to the next level.

Despite all the unpainted sheet rock, the scaffolds and the cabinets lying on the floor, the plan, assures Dove, is to have the majority of what is called the resort center completed by the time the golfers — and the TV cameras — arrive the second week of October.

That's no small goal for a building that consists of 45,000 square feet of meeting and convention space, a 15,000-square-foot spa and a 25,000-square-foot pro shop.

Also, the plan is to have enough of the condo and hotel units finished to be able to house a portion of the professional golfers, PGA staff and broadcast teams.

At completion, Black Desert will have 800 "keys," says Dove, counting hotel rooms and condominium units combined. That will make it the largest resort hotel in southern Utah, by far, and one of the biggest in all of Utah, rivaling Snowbird with its 882 rooms.

The finished resort, at a final price tag of $2 billion, will also include Boardwalk Village — a pedestrian walkway with numerous restaurants and retail shops, although that project isn't likely to be finished for another two years.

All this, in a lava field the Latter-day Saint pioneers who settled here 165 years ago couldn't figure how to get their wagons across.

The rapid growth, Dove concedes, isn't met with universal praise. Some residents of Ivins, a town that for years had less than 2,000 people, might look askance at a project that, when fully built, will house more than that all by itself.

But the intent of Manning, she notes, is to elevate not just Ivins but all of the St. George area by providing a gathering place the likes of which the area hasn't seen before.

It will also employ a lot of people. At full strength, Dove estimates the resort will employ upward of 1,000 people. Already, it's hired nearly 400 to get ready for the golf tournament.

Gazing at the black-and-green landscape outside the unfinished pro shop window, Dove muses, "I'd have never thought, 'perfect place for a resort,' but Manning did. He sees things. I don't think anyone initially believed him in the beginning; it looks uninhabitable."

The tour over, Dove guides Gwilliam and me toward the stairs that earlier brought us into the daylight.

"We'll back out through the garage," she says, "I won't get us lost this time. They haven't had to send a search party out for me yet."

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