In the early 1960s, Laurance Rockefeller flew over a stark stretch of black lava on the Big Island's Kohala Coast and saw not wasteland but the site of a resort no one had yet attempted in Hawaii. There was no fresh water, no soil, and no golf tradition on this shore — only an old fishing cove at Kaunaoa Bay and mile after mile of raw lava rock. Rockefeller commissioned Robert Trent Jones Sr., by then the most sought-after golf architect in America, to lay a course across it. The Mauna Kea Golf Course opened in 1964 alongside the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, one of the first true luxury resorts in the islands and the course that proved championship golf could be built there at all.

Jones built it the hard way. Fairway corridors were blasted and bulldozed through solid lava, and soil had to be trucked and barged in from elsewhere on the island just to give grass anywhere to grow — an amount of earthmoving almost unheard of for a golf course at the time. What emerged was recognizably a Trent Jones design: long, strategically bunkered, demanding precise position off the tee, but routed to keep the ocean in near-constant view as the course climbs and falls along the coastline above Kaunaoa and Hapuna Bays.

The course's signature is its third hole, a par 3 that plays entirely over open Pacific water from an elevated tee to a green set into the far side of a rocky cove. Depending on the wind, the carry can call for anything from a short iron to a fairway wood, and for six decades golfers — amateurs and touring pros alike — have named it among the most beautiful, and most nerve-testing, single shots in the game.

Mauna Kea helped invent destination resort golf in Hawaii. Where the islands had previously offered little beyond municipal and old plantation courses, Rockefeller's resort and Jones's course gave traveling golfers a reason to cross the Pacific for the game itself, opening the door for the wave of Kohala Coast resort courses that followed in the decades after. More than sixty years on, it remains one of the most honored resort courses in American golf, still played largely as Jones first routed it across the lava.

Museum-quality Mauna Kea Golf Course map art, traced from real course data — every bunker, green, and fairway. Home to the legendary over-the-ocean par-3 3rd, carved from a raw Kohala Coast lava field in 1964. Four designs, six sizes, or personalized with your own round photo.

Course data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)