St. George, Utah

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I’ve driven through St. George several times, and even spent a few nights here, but it wasn’t until this trip that I actually took a look at the town itself.

St. George seems to be delightfully livable.  Like many cities in Utah, the Mormon influence seems to give St. George a neat-and-tidy, traditional small-town feel.

You’ll notice a big letter “D” on one hillside (just below the St. George Airport), and the word “Dixie” painted on a cliff near downtown.  The southwestern corner of the state is known as “Utah’s Dixie”, and even the local college, Dixie State, carries the name.

If you drive up Airport Road, onto the hill above the big “D”, you’ll get a nice view of downtown St. George.  I imagine you could get a similarly nice view from Skyline Drive, which runs along the ridge in the distance (Take 100 E north from downtown to reach Skyline Drive).

The center of downtown is at Main & Tabernacle where there’s a traffic circle and, you guessed it…

…a Latter-Day Saints Church.

St. George also has a much larger LDS Temple, on S 300 E.

Have you noticed the weird street names?  Most cities in Utah give their streets numbers instead of names, and those numbers are often multiples of 100.  In other words, instead of 1st Street South, you get 100 South, and instead of 42nd Street West, you get 4200 West.  The system comes in handy for adding roads between the major streets on the grid: you don’t need to have a 1-and-a-half street, if it’s between 1st and 2nd — instead, you have a street called 150.  Once you understand the concept, street addresses make sense: 1402 East 22nd Avenue North would be 14 blocks east of the center of the grid, and 22 blocks north, and would be called 1402 E 2200 N.  See? It’s easy!

Before leaving Utah and heading back to Vegas to catch my flight home, there was one more place I wanted to see, and just enough time to get there: Snow Canyon.

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