St. George, UT
The current St. George Regional opened on January 12, 2011, replacing the original airport built in the 1940s on a small mesa that had run out of room to grow. The new field sits on a much larger mesa southeast of town. Single 9,300ft runway 1/19, Class D, commercial service from Delta, United, American, and Allegiant. The closest commercial airport to Zion National Park, 50 miles northeast. St. George itself is the fastest-growing metro in Utah; the Mormon pioneer settlement of 1861 has become a winter retreat from the Wasatch Front, with year-round desert flying and 300+ days of sun. Density altitude rises fast in summer — surface DA at the field regularly tops 6,000ft on July afternoons.
A 230-square-mile slot-canyon park in southwestern Utah, named by Mormon pioneer Isaac Behunin in 1863 — Zion is Hebrew for "place of refuge." The park's defining feature is Zion Canyon, a 15-mile gorge carved by the Virgin River through 2,000 feet of Navajo Sandstone, a pale orange-and-cream stone laid down 180 million years ago in what was the largest sand dune system in geologic history. Angel's Landing is a thin ridge requiring a chained scramble; the Narrows is a hike in the river itself through canyon walls less than 30 feet apart at points. The park gets over 4 million visitors a year, second only to Grand Canyon among national parks in the Southwest. From the air the canyon appears as a sharp gash of pale stone in the surrounding pinyon-juniper plateau.
Nevada's oldest and most beloved state park, named for what the low sun does to it: the bright red Aztec sandstone outcrops seem to catch fire, glowing against the grey-and-tan limestone mountains around them. The sandstone is petrified Jurassic sand dunes — the same formation that surfaces across the Colorado Plateau — eroded into pinnacles, beehives, arches, and slot canyons. People have been here a long time: petroglyphs carved by the Basketmaker and Early Pueblo peoples, some 2,500 years old, cover the rocks at Atlatl Rock and Petroglyph Canyon. It's a short hop northeast of Las Vegas but feels like another planet — which is why it has stood in for Mars in the movies.
Not actually a canyon — Bryce is a series of natural amphitheaters carved into the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau in southern Utah. The amphitheaters are filled with hoodoos: thin spires of pink, orange, and white limestone created by freeze-thaw weathering of the Claron Formation, a 50-million-year-old lakebed deposit. The largest concentration of hoodoos on Earth stands here — tens of thousands of them, ranging from a few feet to 200 feet tall. Park elevation runs from 8,000 to 9,100 feet, making Bryce a summer destination when lower Utah parks are sweltering. Ebenezer Bryce, a Mormon homesteader who arrived in 1875, reportedly called the area "a hell of a place to lose a cow."
A 726-foot concrete arch-gravity dam wedged into Black Canyon on the Colorado River, completed in 1936 — more than two years ahead of schedule — by a workforce that totaled around 21,000 during the Depression. Tallest dam in the world at the time. The dam holds back Lake Mead, which when full is the largest reservoir in the US by volume; current drought has dropped water levels dramatically, exposing the historic "bathtub ring" along the canyon walls. The Arizona-Nevada border runs across the top of the dam. Pre-WWII Art Deco styling — sculptures of winged figures, terrazzo floors, brass clocks set to Nevada and Arizona time on either side.