The Story
Entrada — Spanish for 'entrance' — sits exactly where its name says it should: at the gateway to Snow Canyon, where ancient lava flows spilled across the desert floor beneath the Navajo and Kayenta sandstone cliffs of southern Utah. In 1996, Johnny Miller and Fred Bliss routed a golf course straight through that landscape, and it became one of the most photographed in the Southwest — emerald fairways cut against jagged black rock and red stone, unlike anything else in the game.
The original course had a reputation to match its looks. Miller's design was famously penal — the closing stretch through the lava fields could wreck a scorecard as quickly as it filled a camera roll. Members loved it and feared it in roughly equal measure, and for a quarter century that was simply what Entrada was: beautiful, brutal, and unforgettable.
Then the club did something bold. Beginning in 2020, David McLay Kidd — the Scotsman behind Bandon Dunes and Gamble Sands — stripped the course down to the dirt in a 17-month, $7 million redesign. Every green was rebuilt, fairways were widened, and the ground game came alive, all without losing an inch of the lava-field drama. When the new par-71 course reopened in April 2022, Golf Digest named it the year's Best Transformation.
Today Entrada is a private club with a well-known side door — a stay at the Inn at Entrada comes with access — and its stature keeps growing: the Utah Golf Association has selected it to host the 2030 Utah Women's State Amateur and the 2031 Utah State Amateur, bringing those championships to southern Utah for the first time. Play it once at sunset, when the cliffs go crimson and the lava goes ink-black, and you understand why people frame this place.