It's Been 84 Year's: Why the Pga Tour Is Finally Returning to Asheville, North Carolina
Landing a modern PGA Tour stop requires far more than aesthetic mountain vistas. Tour agronomy officials inspect fairway turf resilience, player locker spaces, gallery circulation corridors, and compound capacity for dozens of network television production trucks. The Cliffs at Walnut Cove, nestled along the base of the Pisgah National Forest in Arden, solved those operational hurdles.
Opened in 2005, the Jack Nicklaus Signature layout plays at 7,118 yards to a par of 71. While mountain courses often suffer from extreme elevation drops that limit walking galleries, Walnut Cove sits in a unique, natural plateau bowl. The front nine winds gently through native woodlands before opening into broad, spectator-friendly meadows along the creek beds of the back nine. Organizers created park-and-ride staging centers near Asheville Regional Airport, keeping tournament traffic separated from residential corridors in Arden and South Asheville.
