Destination Golf Vacation — St. George, Utah

There’s no such thing as bad golf, as long as the pace of play is reasonable and the greens are decent. In college in San Diego our home course was Torrey Pines. I’ve played in Scotland, Monterey Peninsula, Maui and even in Tijuana, but I’m just as happy playing our local Seattle-ish public courses, like West Seattle, The Home Course, Trophy Lake, Gold Mountain, Chambers Bay, and the WA Golf list goes on. That said, multiday destination golf trips with friends are especially awesome. Great golf (courses that is) in the morning. Pool and hot tub time in the afternoon. Dinner and poker after that. Crash, rinse, repeat.

For the last few years, I’ve been doing an annual destination golf trip with a group of friends from high school. We’ve played Bandon Dunes, Santa Barbara/Santa Ynez, and this year, St. George, Utah, a place I was unfamiliar with other than their marathon’s reputation as a great net-downhill racecourse to clock a qualifying time for Boston.

St. George has some absolutely great courses, plenty of Airbnbs and it’s not too difficult to get there. We flew into Vegas mid-afternoon and we’re at our Airbnb in time for dinner. (Highly recommend having a couple guys in your group who don’t mind hitting up Costco on the way to St. George and are super solid on the grill and in the kitchen. Thanks, Gore and Gussy!)    

Next up, Sand Hollow. Loved this course. It’s ranked as the top course in Utah by Golfweek and #54 in the U.S. for good reason. Hole #13 is one you won’t forget. A shorty, but an intimidating tee shot to an uphill, narrow fairway. Leave your driver in the bag and be careful not to yank your approach left off that uphill lie; easy to do and a sure-fire way to butcher the best hole of the day like I did. The 15th is an awesome knee-knocker par 3. Left is Gonesville, population 1 (or more) and right isn’t great either. Here’s Kyle Berkshire making double from the hillside: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKVvG1JNnxV/

Coral Canyon was the first course we played on the trip. Perfect starter, beautiful and playable with plenty room to find the fairways and big, true greens. Nice way to ease into the trip. Shot 41 on the back (pretty good for me these days) and could have played better. Copper Rock was also a ton of fun. In really good shape, nice, open and very playable. And like every course in Southern Utah, it’s stunningly beautiful and worthy of destination golf trip.