The Empty Interstate
Trip Start
Sep 16, 2010
1
5
13
Trip End
Sep 29, 2010
Barstow, California
Monday, September 20, 2010
The prettiest part of this trip is the 30 mile section that cuts across the northwest corner of Arizona. The highway here goes through the Virgin River Canyon and the rock formations are beautiful but there's really no good place to pull off the road for a photo op, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Plenty of photos in the next five days to make up for that.
I arrived in St. George at 3 p.m. after switching my watch to Mountain Time. The staff at Dixie State College is very friendly and helpful. At 5:30 we met our bus driver (Bob) and headed off to the College for a buffet dinner. The college was a 2-year school until just recently, but now they offer 12 different bachelors degrees. Our coordinator, Nancy, explained why it's called Dixie College--St. George was always known as the Dixie of Utah because of the warm climate, and the fact that the town began as a cotton growing area. During the Civil War they were unable to get cotton from the South, so they planted some cotton seeds here and supplied all the cotton for the state. Like many towns started by the Mormon pioneers, it has wide streets laid out on a numbered grid (the College Inn is located at 123 East 100 South). The width of the streets was determined by taking a team of oxen pulling a wagon and figuring out how much room they needed to turn around. They also have deep gutters, remnants of the old irrigation system for farmers.
After getting to know each other a little at dinner, we had our first class, which was really just an orientation session where we went over our schedule for the week and met our two photographers, Blake Gordon and Eric Draper. Eric is an adventure photographer specializing in rock climbing and canyoneering, and Blake leans more toward landscape photography. They showed us a few of their terrific photographs, and I'm looking forward to learning a lot from them.
