Southern Utah

On Saturday we left the house at six for a short little two-day stint to St. George and southern Utah. Jeff Johnson got married on Saturday at noon at the St. George temple--that was our motive. Originally it was going to be a daytrip, but Amy surprised me Thursday (our anniversary) by telling me we'd be spending the night in a nice new Courtyard Marriott hotel there (because she works at a Marriott, she gets some sweet deals).

Here's my token map of the trip.

St. George was deathly, hellishly hot. About 105--and just two days before they'd had this massive downpour with flooded freeways and flipped cars and so on. So the humidity factor was enormous. It's such a bummer feeling when you're thinking to yourself, "I have to get inside somewhere, a car, a building, a house, anything with AC or else I will just die." Well, we weren't thinking that the whole time, but practically. I was in church clothes too for a while and that didn't help.

Jeff's wedding was nice, the ceremony fast. Afterwards we had a luncheon at The Pizza Factory. St. George's a nice place. It's a lot like Folsom though: tons of shopping, new development, trendy. But the red rocks and cliffs lined up to the east and west are amazing and worth seeing. After lunch we went to our hotel and swam in a cute, small-enough pool and a hot tub we could all enjoy. Jarom loved jumping from the rocks--both kids are getting pretty good at swimming, or at least learning to swim. Won't be long before they're pros. We went to Jeff and Nicole's reception at seven. It was Hawaiian-themed, with tiki torches and an authentic two-man band and pineapple and that sort of thing. Nicole's mom is Japanese but she was raised in Hawaii, so they have this cool heritage going on.

The wedding included some dancing, some desserts, and so on. Bella kept saying that Nicole was a princess in her wedding dress, and that she wanted to meet her. But when she finally did, she grew very shy--trademark Bella. The cutest part was when all the single girls lined up for the bouquet, I had Bella go over just for fun. But the girls were all so sweet that they made it so Bella would get the flowers, then told her that she would be the next princess. So the rest of the night she kept holding up or showing off her flowers and saying, "Look! I'm going to be the next princess."

Sunday we left the hotel with few plans, the wide open road ahead of us, the sun brightening overhead, and it was only noon. I wanted to go to Cedar Breaks National Monument, east of Cedar City. On the way there, before a tiny town called Leeds, we saw a sign that said Silver Reef Historic Site. I had seen this sign on the way down as well--these types of roadside symbols always call out to me, saying something like, "Adventure awaits!" So we pulled off, and went up to this little ghost town: Silver Reef. It was a fine town, kind of made up and redone with a gift shop and museum and such. Nothing was open though, it being Sunday and all. So we marveled at the view, then left. Apparently Silver Reef is the only place in the US where silver was found in sandstone. It existed for a slight silver boom, then faded away within a few years. The main building there was a Wells Fargo bank building built in 1877 (same year the St. George temple was completed) that was in use for a few years.

Down the road there was a sign that said Pioneer Cemeteries: Protestant / Catholic, and we wanted to find them. We drove a bumpy red-dirt road and found a splash-painted white fence surrounding some gravestones and wooden crosses--the Protestant Cemetery. We walked through it, looked at the graves. Some of the inscriptions were quite sad--many young children and infants died in the late 1800s out there in the desert. Further up the road there was a much smaller Catholic cemetery with only a couple marked graves. One was a massive obelisk, with black wroughtiron fencing around it in the shape of leaves or vines. That man was born in New York, March 13th--Orion's birthday. Another smaller grave was for a man from Dublin, Ireland, who was born on May 18th--Bella's birthday. How these guys ended up in Silver Reef, Utah is forever a mystery.

We hit the highway again to Cedar City, turned off on highway 14 and went east, 10,000 feet up to where Cedar Breaks is. It's beautiful, all these colorful, many-shaped canyons opening on either side of us. Up at the top we drove through a high mountain meadow with a huge flock of sheep grazing on either side of the road. They spooked easily and trotted off when you drove by, but it was all unfenced and really pretty nice; we liked to think that those sheep were pretty happy up there, wandering and eating without boundaries, and that their owner treated them well. And then we were there and these cliffs and hoodoos spread out like an ampitheatre, the colors of sand and rust and pumpkin. We stared awestruck for a while, visited the tiny visitor center and got a couple little books, then left, with me trying to figure out the difference between spruce and fir.

We took highway 148 along the top of the Markagunt Plateau and saw this peak jutting up above the rest of the land--Brian Head Peak. So we drove this dirt-gravel road three miles up to the top of it, which summits at 11,300 feet! That's only about 400 feet shy of Mount Timpanogos' summit (which is where we will all be before you know it). There's an old USGS brick shack up top, and Jarom and I walked out into the wind to check it out. You can see portions of Nevada, Arizona and Utah from the peak. There was a couple over there as well, taking pictures. They reminded me of Misty and Allen. We took each other's photos and then went along our merry way. We headed down 148 towards Parowan, back on I-15, and along the way we went down through Brian Head, a tiny town and home of a ski resort. The road was quite steep, so we took it slowly. Once in Parowan, we ate lunch at a Subway in a TA travel center, and then went north again without stop or interruption, heading home. We stared at the fields, farms and mountains in Santaquin and Nephi and thought, we could live here. We could live anywhere.


Jarom jumping.

Amy and the kids in the pool.

Bella meeting the princess.

Bella with her bouquet--she's going to be the next princess.

Jarom in front of the Wells Fargo building at Silver Reef.

In front of the Protestant cemetery.

"In memory of Clarence L. Callaway. Born Dec 31 1880, died May 26 1883. Little Clarence how we miss you, since you left us here alone, in the house it seems . . ."

"Baby West. Born & died Nov 28 1879. Rest baby rest."

Jarom underneath the juniper in the Catholic cemetery, around unknown graves.

Sheep in the mountains.

Jarom, Bella and I walking to the visitor center at Cedar Breaks.

Jarom checking out the view.

Cedar Break National Monument. You can see Brian Head Peak in the distance, up center, poking out above everything.

Up at Brian Head Peak.

The wall that separated us from the edge.

Archway shot of the CCC cabin.

Little rainbow welcoming us back home.