Utah - Day 16 - St. George

St. George/Hurricane KOA, Hurricane
Saturday, 16 October 2021

today's route

On the road

As you can see, St. George is almost on top of Arizona and not far from Nevada.  It's just over 100 miles from Las Vegas, NV, but more than 300 miles from Salt Lake City.  The drive today was only 130 miles, but we certainly changed locations - Beaver has 3,100 residents while St. George has 87,000.  It's a difference.

Passing the town of Summit, I thought I saw a glacier in the mountains, in fact a series of glaciers.  But Wikipedia tells me that there's only one glacier left in Utah, that it's back along the road I took from Vernal to the SLC area earlier this month, and that it's not even a real glacier any more but instead is considered a "rock glacier" because the ice seems to be buried in a rock slide.  So I guess I saw snowfields instead.  There're still a lot of patches of snow on the ground here and there, though it had all melted back up in Beaver several days ago.

I was seeing mountains on both sides of the highway the whole way south, with the highway running through a wide flat valley between them.  I saw cows, crops, scattered towns, lots of juniper/cedar.

Apropos of nothing, I passed a sign saying "Elevation 5,000'."  I mean there was nothing around - no town, no ascending road, nothing.

Following a 6% grade in the road (and the tiny towns of Snowfield, Pintura and Browse), I saw another sign: "Elevation 4,000'."  Again, nothing at all around.  Just the sign.

And a little farther along the road I came to yet another sign: "Elevation 3,000'."  I found these signs to be almost bizarre because I'd been driving for 2 weeks in mountainous areas and populated areas and saw signs like these only at summits.  And here, out of the blue, the highway department gratuitously tells drivers a miscellaneous elevation level.  Huh?

St. George

St. George ranks #8 out of the top 10 Utah cities for population, but is the 2nd largest on that list for area - which I guess means they're more spread out here?  St. George has the distinction of sitting near the convergence of 3 geological areas: the Mojave Desert, the Colorado Plateau, and the Great Basin, so its plant life and wildlife include samples from all 3 regions.

It was founded in 1861 by Brigham Young's southern followers - from the southern US states, I mean - who decided the climate was good here for cotton farming.  I don't know if these cotton farmers used slave labor on their farms.  But I do know that Brigham Young believed Black people inherently inferior to whites and to be descended from Cain, thus deserving of enslavement, and he actively worked to legalize slavery in legislation.  

What I also know is that these good ol' southern folks with their good ol' cotton farms inspired the designation of this area as Dixie.  What I also also know is that the nearby national forest was named Dixie in their honor and remains so named to this day.  Naturally, the local college in St. George is named Dixie State University.

We all stopped for a break at Dixie Middle School.  I figured no one would be there on a Saturday morning so we could walk around, and I was right.

Coming into town I saw 3 hot air balloons flying around, though I wasn't close enough to see their colors.  Still, it's not something I see often.

The town of St. George is built next to a tall red embankment with lots of houses built on the top.  It's odd-looking somehow, with all these houses perched on the mesa top and a nice old town down at the base of the cliff.

I tried to drive past the local Temple Square and St. George's Temple, figuring they might be worth a gander, but the street was all torn up in exactly that block and I couldn't get anywhere close.

I went to a grocery store where I'd been assured there were recycling bins, and there were.  I managed to get rid of everything in one fell swoop.

This house (at left) was Brigham Young's Winter Home.  The main part of the house was finished in 1871 and he lived there during the winters from 1870 until 1877 (the year he died).  It sits about 2 blocks from the Temple.

This is an internet photo, the street being too narrow and crowded for me to stop for my own photo.  The house is open for tours, and I saw a Mormon missionary (young, white male in a white shirt and narrow black tie) standing in the doorway talking to some folks who were visiting.  

I bought groceries and stopped at 2 pet stores to pick up provisions - my last 10 days in Utah I'll be in a part of the state that doesn't look very well-supplied with stores.

I noticed that gasoline on the east side of I-15 was $3.99/gallon and on the west side it was $3.74.  Once I saw that, I drove back over to the west side to fill up.  That's a big difference - especially with the size of my gas tank.

Xeriscaping is very big here.  It's not used at the Brigham Young house, but I saw it at almost all other public buildings.  Reasonable for a place near the Mojave Desert but not so great for my dogs who aren't used to cactus and who like to roll around on grass.

Most of the people I saw either weren't wearing masks at all or weren't wearing them over their noses and were covering their mouths so loosely I could see their mouths.  In other words, I don't think these folks are taking this virus seriously.  Utah as a whole has just under 60% who've had at least 1 shot, and I'm guessing this part of the state is lower than that.

I've been increasingly frustrated by the rude and/or lousy drivers I've seen with Utah license plates, but in St. George, most were almost polite, which was a pleasant change.

I saw several plants that looked like this:

Joshua Tree

That's what I thought a Joshua Tree looked like, and the internet says it does.  They're native to the arid Mojave Desert area, including here.  I only saw a few but it's nice to have seen any.

Back on the road

Driving north of town I saw a sign saying "Dinosaur Tracks."  At St. George there's a Dinosaur Discovery Site Museum (that wanted too much for an entrance fee) and in the town of Washington just north of there, there's a short hiking trail that leads to 17 well-preserved dinosaur footprints.  Access to the trail, though, is via an unpaved road which they say is "passable by most vehicles," which wasn't reassuring enough for me.  I still well remember seeing dinosaur tracks in Massachusetts, and I saw plenty of dinosaur bones up near Vernal, so I feel fairly well up on dinosaurs for an ignorant tourist.

And on to tonight's campground, which was also built on the side of a hill.  The office was substantially lower in the ground than the campsites, with the back campsites butting right up against a towering red cliff.

I'd barely managed to get a reservation for tonight - they'd told me only 2 sites were left when I called, but I was lucky and got assigned one that was on the edge of the park, so we could get out fairly easily for walks.