Palmetto Dunes - Arthur Hills Course

The Arthur Hills Course at Palmetto Dunes is the thinking player's course in the Hilton Head resort's three-course rotation, where lagoons wind through ten of eighteen holes and accuracy matters more than distance. Hills built it in 1986 as a deliberate departure from the Robert Trent Jones layout that opened the resort. Where Jones offers generous fairways and defends par at the green, Hills built a layout where positional play from the tee shapes everything that follows.

The course measures 6,651 yards with a slope of 129 and a rating of 72.9. Those numbers understate the difficulty for anyone who sprays the ball, because the lagoons collect offline shots with a quiet efficiency that the slope rating does not fully capture. For accurate players, the round flows. For erratic ones, the water becomes a recurring theme.

Ocean breezes factor into club selection throughout the day. The course sits close enough to the Atlantic that wind patterns shift as the day moves on, typically building through the afternoon. Morning rounds tend to play calmer and shorter. Afternoon rounds require more thought, particularly on the water-guarded approach shots where a one-club wind error turns a green-in-regulation chance into a penalty stroke.

The quietly intelligent option at Palmetto Dunes. Choose accurate tee shots and position over distance, and the course rewards the work in ways that a single round will not entirely reveal.