Cerca: Walking tour highlights history of St. George, Utah

ST. GEORGE, UTAH -- Traveling around southern Utah is one of the greater pleasures of my life. Most often, I bypass the larger towns in favor of rural areas or vacant public lands. Recently, though, I took a full day just visiting St. George and found it not only rich in history and full of culture but also blessed with wonderful outdoor places to go.

In a less than two-hour drive from Las Vegas, my daughter Olivia and I were in St. George's Historic District. Our first stop was at the old courthouse, which now houses the St. George Chamber of Commerce. We came not only to see the old building, which took 10 years to build and was completed in 1876, but also to pick up a walking tour map to see some of the other historic buildings in this area.

Leaving our car near the courthouse, we set out on foot first to visit some of the district's 26 historic sites. We didn't have time for all of them but did pack about half into our day. Our first stop was the old jailhouse, its single room constructed in 1880 from local lava rock.

One of the more popular sites along the tour is Brigham Young's winter home. Young was the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was largely responsible for colonizing many rural areas of Utah and parts of what is now Nevada.

In 1861, he called on more than 300 families to leave the Salt Lake Valley and settle this part of Utah, which was called the Cotton Mission. Besides cotton, the settlers were told to grow sugar, grapes, tobacco, figs and almonds.

His two-story house was built in 1869 of adobe, plaster and local rock. Now it's surrounded by mature deciduous trees and a large grass yard with a quaint white picket fence. The house has a large wrap-around porch. Inside, the house is decorated and furnished with some original pieces, but there also are replicas of what furniture might have looked like when Young lived there.

Young chose St. George to build an LDS temple, which was completed in 1877, even before the famed temple in Salt Lake City. Snow-white and soaring dramatically out of the cultivated green landscape, profiled against the brilliant red cliffs that surround the city, it remains the most visually striking feature in any view of St. George and one of the more popular places to visit.

Visitors may stroll the grounds and enter the visitor center but are not allowed in the temple itself, which is reserved for its original purpose of conducting sacred ceremonies for members of the church.

St. George sits at an elevation of about 2,800 feet, not much higher than Las Vegas, so December is mild there and an ideal time to enjoy outdoor activities and particularly the area's seasonal celebrations.

The Tuacahn Center for the Arts presents its annual "Christmas in the Canyon" event, including a free festival of lights, every Thursday, Friday and Saturday evening through Dec. 23. Admission is charged for a live Nativity scene. Rides are offered on the Old Salty Train, and children get a chance to talk to Santa Claus. He is on hand from 6 to 9 p.m.

The center is at Ivins, about eight miles from St. George. If you head that way in the daytime you could combine that side trip with a visit to a nearby and quite wonderful petroglyph site where close to 1,000 prehistoric rock drawings adorn a 300-foot cliff. Ask any of the friendly locals for directions.

Another great annual event is the Dickens Christmas Festival, that runs Wednesday through Dec. 3. The Dixie Convention Center is transformed into 19th-century London. It's a place to start your Christmas shopping while being entertained by people in period costumes. These characters may be drawn from the stories of Dickens or merely his Victorian era. There are members of the royal family, there are street urchins and there are fortune tellers to suggest the direction in which your own future lies.

St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm is worth a visit any time of year. This enclosed 15,000-square-foot museum houses more than 2,000 individual dinosaur tracks as well as fossilized remains of fish and the leaves and seeds of plants.

The site was discovered in February 2000 when a local resident was leveling his land and dug up a three-dimensional preserved dinosaur track. Further investigation determined this site once lay along the western edge of a large freshwater lake now referred to as Lake Dixie. This lake was here during the early Jurassic Age, sometime between 195 million and 198 million years ago.

Even in one of Utah's principal cities you are never far from the state's outdoor beauty. It's only about a 10-minute drive north from St. George to Snow Canyon, a landscape of red Navajo sandstone, black lava-capped cliffs, ancient cinder cones, sand dunes and deep washes.

At an elevation of about 3,100 feet, the canyon rarely sees snow. It was named after Lorenzo and Erastus Snow, prominent pioneers in this area. The park encompasses 7,400 acres and offers 16 miles of hiking trails and plenty of opportunities for rock climbing, horseback riding, wildlife viewing and camping.

If you get a sense of deja vu on your first visit here, it's because you really have seen this landscape before. It has been used to film a few scenes for several popular movies, including "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Jeremiah Johnson" and "Romancing the Stone."

Assuming you have limited time, the best trail to take in winter is the one into Johnson Canyon. It is an easy two-mile roundtrip hike yet offers plenty of diversity, including a natural spring, riparian habitats and the 200-foot span Johnson Canyon Arch.

We decided to take old Highway 91 on our return home. This took us through the quaint town of Santa Clara and then out to more rural areas and then loops around and hits Interstate 15 on the Arizona Strip. Until Interstate 15 was constructed through the Virgin River Gorge, opening in 1973, this was the main route to Las Vegas from St. George and points north. Highway 91 bypasses the gorge and intersects with Interstate 15 at Littlefield, Ariz., just north of Mesquite.