Sterling is the smallest of the US-89 towns by a wide margin — a couple hundred people on a brief stretch of highway six miles south of Manti — and most travelers would pass through it in under a minute if it were not the turnoff for one of central Utah's favorite places to cool off.
The town was settled in 1873 by William G. Petty and never grew much beyond a farming hamlet; it has the unhurried, slightly sun-bleached quality of a place that long ago made its peace with being small. The reason to stop sits a mile to the east, up a road that climbs toward the mouth of Sixmile Canyon.
That is Palisade State Park, and its lake has an unusually deliberate origin. In the 1870s a Sterling settler named Daniel B. Funk bargained with the local San Pitch band for the land, then spent years building an earthen dam and digging a canal from Sixmile Creek to fill a basin he had chosen specifically as a place for people to relax. Funk's Lake, as it was first known, became a popular pioneer resort; a later owner who hailed from the Hudson River Palisades in New York gave it the name it carries now, and the state took it over as a park in 1962.
Today Palisade is the draw — a reservoir for paddling and fishing, a campground, and an 18-hole desert-canyon golf course, with the Arapeen OHV trails climbing east out of Sixmile Canyon toward Skyline Drive on the Manti division of the forest. US-89 runs on south from here to Gunnison, and a side road peels east to Mayfield and Twelve Mile Canyon. Sterling itself stays what it has always been: the quiet doorway to all of it.
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