I-15: The Virgin River Gorge
Three states in twenty-nine Arizona miles — I-15 threads the Virgin River Gorge, the most expensive rural interstate ever built, following the desert water that drew every road here from the Old Spanish Trail to the Las Vegas Springs.
The Route at a Glance
Interstate 15 clips just twenty-nine miles of Arizona — the far northwest corner, the orphaned Arizona Strip north of the Grand Canyon — but those miles hold one of the great drives of the American road system, and they tie three states together along a line that water drew long before any engineer did.
Start in Utah's Dixie. St. George sits in red-rock country where a retired optometrist leveling a hill uncovered a bed of early-Jurassic dinosaur tracks; a few minutes north, Snow Canyon offers Zion's sandstone and lava flows without Zion's crowds. Then the interstate drops south and the walls close in.
The Virgin River Gorge is the reason this route exists and the reason it was nearly impossible to build. The river, draining the Utah plateaus, sawed a canyon through the Beaver Dam Mountains that falls seventy feet to the mile — ten times the Colorado's grade through the Grand Canyon — its banded walls rising a thousand feet where the Colorado Plateau breaks down into the Mojave. Federal planners ran I-15 straight through it to save twelve miles, and when the last section opened in December 1973 it was the most expensive rural interstate ever built, per mile, in the country. Utah advanced its own road money to Arizona to finish a highway that barely touches Arizona at all.
That is the joke the whole corridor tells: this was never Arizona's road. It was water's road first. This is Nuwuvi — Southern Paiute — homeland, and the springs and rivers that let people cross the Mojave dictated every route through it. South of the gorge the interstate follows the old logic toward the Muddy River, where the ancestral Puebloan farming towns that archaeologists call the Lost City stood before Lake Mead drowned them, and past the burning Jurassic sandstone of Valley of Fire. It ends where the water did: at the Las Vegas Springs, the desert seep that made Las Vegas possible — a Paiute watering place, then a stop on the Old Spanish Trail and the Mormon Road, then a fort, then a city of neon that forgot it was ever about water at all.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
6 stops along the route, in driving order from St. George, Utah to Las Vegas, Nevada. 4 of them sit off the road itself — the distance is noted on each.
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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let I-15: The Virgin River Gorge do what it does best.
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