Arthur Hills Course at Palmetto Dunes

The Arthur Hills Course at Palmetto Dunes Resort on Hilton Head Island is one of the island's most demanding resort tracks, routing 18 holes through marsh-edged terrain and forest corridors with demanding carries over water and strategically bunkered fairways that test the full range of shot-making.

The Arthur Hills Course at Palmetto Dunes Oceanfront Resort on Hilton Head Island opened in 1986 as the third championship course at the resort complex, joining the Robert Trent Jones Sr. and George Fazio courses that had established Palmetto Dunes as one of the Carolina coast's premier destination golf facilities since the early 1970s. Hills brought his Michigan-based design practice and his deep experience with coastal and parkland settings to a site that offered one of the more historically and ecologically significant features anywhere in South Carolina golf: the Leamington Lighthouse, built between 1879 and 1880 as part of a federal navigation system guiding ships into Port Royal Sound. The Historic Leamington Lighthouse — originally known as the Hilton Head Range Light Station — stands as a physical landmark of nineteenth-century American maritime infrastructure visible from multiple holes on the Arthur Hills course. That lighthouse, positioned to guide commercial shipping of an earlier era, now stands watch over a very different kind of commerce: the resort golf industry that has made Hilton Head Island one of the world's most visited golf destinations.

The juxtaposition of Victorian-era navigation equipment and contemporary championship golf creates one of the more unusual landscape narratives in American course design. Hills's design philosophy at Palmetto Dunes emphasized accuracy and precision shot-making over raw distance — an approach that contrasts with the more length-oriented Robert Trent Jones Sr. philosophy that shaped the earlier Palmetto Dunes course. Where Jones typically worked with generous dimensions and demanded length from the tee, Hills created a course where the continuous lines of dunes and thick stands of palmettos that frame the holes require precise positioning rather than maximum distance. Fairway bunkers are conspicuously absent from the Hills design — instead, off-balance lies created by the natural dune topography, ocean breezes that funnel through the palmetto corridors, and an extensive network of lagoons winding through ten holes provide the strategic challenges that shape every round.

The lagoon system that comes into play on ten of the course's eighteen holes was not created for the golf course — it originated in 1968 when Palmetto Dunes management excavated a lagoon system primarily to serve the resort's real estate development and to manage the original swamp landscape that occupied sections of the property. That environmental management work transformed acres of wetland into the networked lagoon system that Hills subsequently incorporated as the course's primary water hazard, giving the design a water-management history that predates the golf course itself. The Palmetto Hall Arthur Hills course — which opened the same year as the Palmetto Dunes Arthur Hills course — means that Hills designed two championship courses on Hilton Head Island in 1991 and that this resort course predates the private club course by five years, allowing golfers to experience Hills's design philosophy across two Hilton Head Island contexts within a single island visit. The course accommodated Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson during their collegiate years, according to course records — a distinction that connects the Palmetto Dunes Hills course to the formative competitive experiences of two players who would go on to combine for more than 30 major championships.

The specific holes and challenges that Woods and Mickelson encountered during their college-era rounds at Palmetto Dunes are unknown, but the course's championship specifications provided a meaningful environment for developing players to test their games against resort-quality conditions on one of golf's most celebrated island destinations.