Near the town of Hurricane, Utah, the ground turns the color of a struck match. Sand Hollow sits up there above the Virgin River Valley, some 30 miles from Zion National Park, and the first thing it asks of you is to accept that golf can belong in a place this red. A course inside Zion would be a fairy tale, and an impossible one. This is perhaps as close as the fairy tale gets. There are 27 holes here: the 18-hole Championship course, stretching to nearly 7,300 yards, and a nine-hole Links design set in the same red sand. But the Championship course is the one that tends to stay with people. Very little earth was moved to make it, and nearly all of that work happened on the most severe ground, holes 11 through 15. Everywhere else the routing simply walks the desert, visiting the big rock outcroppings and blending into the natural landscape. The land does the talking. The front nine is a conversation with stone. Outcrops of red rock rise throughout, and from them the landscape opens up in every direction, so that a routine approach can feel like a lookout. Then the back nine climbs onto a ridge line, and the elevation starts announcing itself. From 12 through 15 the course runs along a cliff edge of more than 200 feet, and this is the stretch that has filled the photographs and drawn the attention at an otherwise under-the-radar resort. Plenty of golfers who come for one round walk off asking when they can play it again. The fifteenth is the famous one. They call it Devil's Throat. Head professional Adam Jasperson describes eleven tee boxes playing downhill anywhere from 160 to 245 yards to a two-tiered green, knee-high grasses and bunkers guarding the right side, and a cliff running down the left. It is known, he says, to eat any errant tee shot with ease. Coming as late as it does, it can ruin a fine medal score or undo a tight match. A hole that beautiful has no business being that cruel, and that is exactly its charm. Yet Jasperson's own vote for the hardest hole goes to the last one. The scorecard rates 6 and 18 as the toughest, but he leans toward 18. It is an uphill par four, and you often reach its tee after a four-hour grind. Fairway bunkers wait at 250 to 280 yards and 230 to 260 yards, right in the landing zones for different players. Four bunkers wrap the green, and from the fairway you cannot see the putting surface at all. "This hole is a test of your mental and physical abilities," he says. You finish blind, climbing, and tired, which feels honest for a desert. Behind all this sits a story of land and of argument. The original owner, Dave Wilkey, traded land with the Bureau of Land Management, and that trade, arguably the linchpin of the whole resort, left ample acreage for a sanctuary for the endangered desert tortoise, a creature of a lineage some 10 million years deep. Golf here shares the ground with something far older than the game. The design came out of friction. Andy Staples was at first the only architect, working with Wilkey, and his routings and plans won the approval that let the courses move forward. Then a new group joined the ownership and insisted on bringing in John Fought, a more experienced and better-known name, whose hand shaped the red sand from there. Wilkey wanted Staples to stay involved, so the two worked as co-designers through the rest of construction, disagreeing often. Somehow the course that emerged feels at ease on its ground, as if the red rock had settled the matter on its own. Carts are mandatory on the Championship course. You will want to stop yours anyway, up on the cliff, just to look.