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A Colorado investor is looking to build a $30 million resort in La Verkin.

La Verkin • A popular pastime relegated to memory by La Verkin residents in Washington County is poised to make a major comeback.

Nearly a decade after the La Verkin Hot Springs resort was shut down and closed to bathers due to legal and financial woes, Colorado investors aim to build a new $30 million resort.

Mogli Cooper, co-owner of Iron Mountain Hot Springs in Glenwood Springs, Colo., and her investment team are proposing to build Zion Canyon Hot Springs, which would be situated on about 16 acres on the opposite side of the Virgin River from the old resort.

“This is something that is definitely going to happen,” Cooper said. “It will be a wonderful and attractive retreat, and it will be located on a perfect spot above the Virgin River.”

As envisioned by Cooper, the resort will include a parking lot, an entry building with locker rooms, about two dozen or more hot soaking pools, a fresh-water pool, a sauna and other spa-like amenities. Cooper said there also could be a Kneipp walk, where bathers get a foot massage by walking on polished pebbles in alternating hot and cold water in special tanks.

And depending on market conditions, a hotel and restaurant could round out the amenities at the resort.

While Zion Canyon’s actual features are up in the air and could change, the investors are already tying down 13 acres next to State Route 9 for the parking lot. Moreover, they signed a contract in July with the Washington Water Conservancy District, which will lease about 3.25 acres for the pools on the south side of the resort.

Under the terms of the 50-year lease, the district has also agreed to provide the resort with access to the water in the La Verkin hot springs it owns for $25,000 a year, automatically adjusted for inflation, or 2 percent of the resort’s annual gross ticket sales, whichever is greater. But Zion Canyon will have to pay for everything else, including installing and maintaining pipes.

“Essentially, [the lease] allows the company to come in, capture the water, pump it up the hill to their ponds and then return all that water to the district,” said Zach Renstrom, the Washington Water Conservancy District’s executive director.

A significant side benefit, he added, is the water returned to the district’s La Verkin hot springs will be cooler and thus help endangered fish such as woundfin, Virgin River chub and spinedace, which stop eating and start to get stressed when water gets too hot.

Renstrom and Utah Sen. Mitt Romney toured the shuttered hot springs earlier this month. During his visit to southwest Utah, Romney warned that significant water conservation must happen in the region, or development opportunities will also dry up.

La Verkin Hot Springs – alternately known as La Verkin Sulphur Springs, Dixie Hot Springs or Pah Tempe in its various incarnations over the past century – produces approximately 7 million gallons of 107-degree hot water per day and releases 109,000 tons of salt (more than 6,800 semi-truck loads) each year, making it one of the top three pollutants of the Colorado River, according to the conservancy district.

District officials are working with the Bureau of Reclamation to explore the possibility of desalinating the springs. In the meantime, they want to make the water from the springs available for recreational pursuits.

(Design by The Land Studio, Inc) A concept plan of the proposed Zion Canyon Hot Springs that, if approved, would be built in La Verkin, Utah.

In 2013, the district acquired the hot springs, which was a recreation hot spot for decades but had fallen into disrepair from frequent disuse, after a protracted legal battle with the previous owner, who went bankrupt.

Soon afterward, the water district closed off public access to protect its assets, and out of liability concerns due to frequent rockfalls and other hazards. District officials explored reopening the site, but decided it would be safer to facilitate an off-site resort that would be operated by private owners.

“Government is not set up to run a resort like this, and we really shouldn’t be running resorts,” Renstrom said. “We had to figure out a way to balance the needs of the public versus the private sector. We also realized that for people to use and enjoy this water, we needed to pump the water somewhere that’s safer.”

Working with Washington County, La Verkin and Hurricane officials, the district put out a request for qualifications four years ago and soon picked Cooper and her team due, in large part, to the success of Iron Mountain Hot Springs, which draws more than 270,000 customers a year since its opening in 2015 and has a similar history as La Verkin’s hot springs.

Progress on the proposed resort was slowed by the coronavirus pandemic but is now heating up. Although no timetable has been set, Cooper is optimistic construction on the resort can begin within the next year.

Ivins City Recorder Christy Ballard remembers frequenting the La Verkin resort as a child on occasion with family and friends. But the stench from the sulfur at the springs, especially from the pools in the caverns, was so foul she usually opted to swim elsewhere.

“It was stinky,” Ballard said. “Honestly, most of the time I would go to the city pool instead because you didn’t smell bad afterward.”

Although he lives across the river from the former resort, former La Verkin Mayor Karl Wilson says he can still smell the [the sulfur] once in a while.

“For us locals, that’s just like a sweet flower,” he quipped. “As young kids, we liked to play in the river because of the hot and the cold and the mud. We’d have the river water coming down mixing with the hot spring water. So sometimes we get a little above the springs to cool off.”

Wilson supports the proposed resort but says some worry about La Verkin losing its small-town feel. For his part, he argues the resort will be a boon to the area’s economy and draw visitors from Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and from as far away as California and Colorado.

La Verkin is located on State Route 9, a major road leading to Zion National Park, which attracts up to 5 million visitors a year. Cooper said that traffic, along with La Verkin’s close proximity to St. George, should make the resort profitable, just like Iron Mountain in Colorado.

“We’re hoping to divert some of those visitors [from Zion] and from the surrounding areas,” she said.

While the look of the new resort is conceptual at this time, La Verkin City Administrator Kyle Gubler is hopeful it will pan out. Nonetheless, he said Zion Canyon investors still need to present a site plan, comply with zoning and get the city to sign off on the resort.

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.

LA VERKIN, Utah (KUTV) — At first glance, you wouldn’t notice anything amiss on 560 West in the La Verkin Overlook neighborhood of Southern Utah.

But neighbors said they have watched the threat of a slow-moving landslide inch closer and closer to their homes.

“For a while it seemed like it was going to be ok, and then it wasn’t ok,” homeowner Clarence Dorsey told 2News.

The landslide, which La Verkin city officials call the "Overlook Slide," forced two homes on the west side of the street to be torn in 2020. Neighbors said it has creeped much closer to the road over the last three months.

“There may be cracks under this road that we don’t know about, that’s a concern for everybody in this neighborhood," said homeowner Stephen Bird. "We bought down here in good faith that all the geologic studies had been done. It’s our retirement home."

Utility crews have been at the site of the Overlook Slide this week to secure utility lines. Superintendent Michael Chandler of the Ash Creek Special Service District, which handles the sewer lines, said the slide is starting to strain utility lines.

“The road overlays our sewer line and it’s starting to pull the existing laterals from the previous homes out. It’s starting to threaten some of our infrastructure,” Chandler said.

The Overlook Slide is mostly to blame on water problems related to soil erosion as result of water runoff, according to a 2021 study by Sunrise Engineering that was given to La Verkin city officials.

The report recommends a regiment of drain systems, testing and monitoring at the site to prevent further erosion.

La Verkin city officials referred comment to Sunrise Engineering. Neighbors said they have not been told any specifics about what the plan is as the erosion gets closer to their street.

“Had it been like this, I would have never bought my lot, I would have never built in this neighborhood,” Dorsey said. “I think the city’s responsibility is to only issue building permits on lots that are suitable to build on.”

A similar situation happened to homes in Riverdale between 2017 and 2019.

A landslide in North Salt Lake damaged homes and a sports club in 2014.

LAVERKIN —When a couple who lived in a bus full-time fell in love with Zion, they put down enough roots to open a guided adventure company along with an outdoor gear consignment shop, which allows the community to obtain gear at less than half the cost of regular outdoor stores.

From a childhood with no outdoor experiences to a new world opened up by nature’s beauty, Cindy Alfaro traded the step-by-step life plan she was expected to achieve for a home-on-wheels and seasonal jobs with her husband, Jared Wright, who has a passion for canyoneering. When they came across an opportunity to do what they loved for a living, they ran with it.

Alfaro, co-owner of Amazing Adventures with her husband, said she spent her childhood in Houston, Texas. With her mother originally from Honduras and her father from Guatemala, they both individually migrated to Texas when they were in their teens.

Her parents met in Houston and were married, then later raised three children, including Alfaro. With a childhood that did not contain opportunities to explore or see nature, she said she didn’t know anything about national parks, camping or climbing. Her parents, who found work very important, instilled in her the order her life should go: complete high school, go to college and obtain a career.

Alfaro said she didn’t have the opportunity to experience the outdoors until the age of 25, when she dated someone who took her on a family trip to Sedona, Arizona. Instantly blown away by the beauty, she kept her full-time accountant job in Houston and began to spend her weekends on trips to explore the outdoors she had missed out on as a child.

On a visit to Moab one year, Alfaro said she met a seasonal river guide who lived out of his Subaru. Completely awe-struck and inspired by the lifestyle, she went back home, put in her two-week notice and moved to Zion, a place she had visited in the past and fallen in love with.

When she arrived in the greater Zion area in 2017, she worked a seasonal job at Under Canvas – a company that offers upscale accommodations in a stunning canyon near Zion National Park. The job also provided housing, which allowed her the ability to free-roam and not be tied to a lease contract. In the winter of 2019, she attended one of the company’s camp openings in Tucson, Arizona, where she met her now-husband.

In the summer of that same year, Alfaro and Wright seasonally moved to Moab, where they purchased a bus to renovate and live in full-time. Alfaro had a full-time job at the time and also worked part-time at Moab gear trader, a consignment shop that offers new and used adventure gear. As a side income, she also purchased items at thrift stores and resold them. Her goal was to make as much money as she could in the summer in order to take the entire winter off to travel.

At the time, Alfaro said her husband had never been to Zion, but she told him how much she loved it and her strong desire to move there. In December 2019, they took the leap and moved to Southern Utah in their renovated bus. Upon arrival, they both took seasonal jobs – her husband worked as a guide at Zion Adventure Company in Springdale, while she worked at Desert Pearl, a hotel downtown.

When COVID-19 struck the community and tours became obsolete, Alfaro said her husband was laid off. Due to both the shutdowns and the heat of summer affecting their bus, they decided to move up to the higher elevations of Kolob to cool off. In 2021, they purchased half an acre and parked their van on the property for the entire year.

While they worked at a general store in Kolob, they were connected with someone who had acquired Amazing Adventures – a tour company that already had permits for canyoneering and climbing. While the owner who acquired the company didn’t know anything about climbing or canyoneering, Alfaro said her husband, who had been a climber since he was 10, offered to run it.

“My dad inspired me to go after the company when I took him canyoneering for his first time. He loved it and wanted to see me share the same experience with others,” Wright said.

With the initial owner concerned about liability issues, the decision was made to purchase the company outright, instead. Alfaro said the hardest part about establishing a guide company is obtaining guide permits, so they were excited to come across a guide company that had already obtained them. Alfaro and Wright officially purchased and launched Amazing Adventures in April of 2021.

Initially, they planned to get either a storefront for the guide company or storage space to house all the gear needed for their tours. As they started to look for a shop space, they wanted to avoid the hustle and bustle and expensive lease prices in Springdale, so they began to look at places in a central hub location – Hurricane.

Alfaro said when they stumbled across a shop space in LaVerkin, they were told by locals that it had been vacant for a very long time. Once a restaurant, she said it would need a ton of renovations in order to become any type of storefront again. When they contacted the owner who had just purchased the property a year prior, she said he wasn’t interested in the renovations needed to lease it, but told them if they wanted to put in the work and get the building up to code, he would give them a deal on rent.

“It was a big project,” Alfaro said. “It was kind of scary because we were investing in this and we weren’t even sure if the city was going to pass the final inspection. It was a big risk.”

Inspired by other consignment shops she had visited and worked at in her past along with her side-hustle of reselling used items, they decided to open both a storefront for their guide business and a consignment store that would offer discounted outdoor adventure gear. Once they came to an agreement on the lease, the renovations began.

They tore down walls, rebuilt a bathroom and more. Alfaro said the city of LaVerkin was great to work with and was excited they wanted to be in the Main Street location.

When they completed the walk-through and received the green light to open their storefront, she and her husband couldn’t wait to get started.

“There are so many people and guides in the area and people passing through, along with locals that are into the outdoors,” Alfaro said. “Kind of wild that there was not a consignment shop here already.”

Amazing Adventures had a soft open and began to accept consignment items in December of 2021. At that time, Alfaro said they were only open two days a week for specific hours in order for people to drop off their gear. The shop had a grand opening party on Feb. 16 and has been open seven days a week ever since. Alfaro runs the shop full-time while her husband steps in often to help. Wright runs the guide side of the company full-time and has four other guides that work for him.

“Owning a guide company is a lot of fun,” Wright said. “We get to share what we love to do with others.”

Wright said it is important to have safe, well-trained guides, and once everyone is comfortable with the safety and rescue systems, Amazing Adventures has the ability to take clients on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure – the ability to tackle large rappels and climbs over 100 feet – activities that most never thought they could do.

The shop offers a variety of hiking, climbing, camping and technical gear, along with touristy, artistic items. Alfaro said there is an even split between new items and consignment items available. Currently, the shop contains climbing gear and hardware, wet suits, helmets and camping items such as tents and sleeping bags. Items on consignment also have tiered pricing.

Some of the new items the shop features include stickers, candles and other items by local artisans. Alfaro is a graphic design artist herself and has created T-shirts, tank tops, stickers and hats with her designs that are available for purchase. Local guide books are also available that contain information on climbing, canyoneering, bouldering and hiking in both Zion and St. George.

Amazing Adventures also holds community days once a month, a day locals who either want to learn how to climb or just want to climb with other locals are able to get out and enjoy the outdoors together. Wright sets up ropes and lends out harnesses, shoes and other items needed to climb for the day. Alfaro said after these community days, many establish a love for climbing and obtain climbing gear right away, and they love to see that.

“This is what we love to do and when we get to see people’s passion for our favorite activities grow. It is very inspiring. It is why we do what we do,” Wright said.

Visit the Amazing Adventures website or follow them on Instagram for more information on guided canyoneering and rock climbing tours along with details on the consignment shop. The gear shop and guide storefront are located at 160 S. State Street in LaVerkin.

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Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.

Grocery e-commerce provider Rosie has officially launched acceptance of electronic benefit transfer (EBT) payments for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) online orders at its first independent grocer.

Ithaca, N.Y.-based Rosie said Wednesday that Davis Food & Drug in Utah now allows SNAP benefits recipients to pay for groceries bought online using their EBT cards. The retailer, with three stores in Vernal, Roosevelt and La Verkin, offers online grocery pickup and delivery through its Davis Direct service, powered by Rosie.

Related: Associated Grocers of Baton Rouge partners with Rosie on e-commerce

“Accepting SNAP payments online is going to make a world of difference,” Jodi Drake, e-commerce lead at Davis Food & Drug, said in a statement. “Serving our community is what we do best, and we’re now able to fulfill a need our customers have thanks to Rosie. To make it even more convenient for shoppers, we’re excited to announce Davis stores will be waiving the pickup fee for everyone

beginning Wednesday, Feb. 9.”

Related: Little Giant Farmer’s Market launches SNAP EBT payment for online orders

Under the SNAP Online Purchasing Pilot, launched in April 2019 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), 47 states and the District of Columbia now allow SNAP beneficiaries to shop and pay for groceries online. In Utah, SNAP online EBT payments are accepted only at Davis Food & Drug, Walmart and Amazon.

Citing federal data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Rosie noted that one in nine Americans rely on benefits provided via EBT, making acceptance of SNAP online payments critical. The nation’s largest nutrition assistance program, SNAP has more than 40 million annual participations, and over two-thirds are families with children, with another third being households with senior citizens or people with disabilities.

“With grocery e-commerce a part of our everyday lives, it’s essential that independent grocers have the tools they need to provide solutions to the underserved in their community, and compete and win against national chains,” according to Jon Mareane, software rollouts lead at Rosie. “Technology continues to advance, and we’re proud to be part of a program that is impacting hundreds of thousands of SNAP recipients nationwide.”

FNS, which administers SNAP, issued a call for retailer volunteers for the SNAP Online Purchasing Pilot in September 2016 and then in January 2017 offered participation in the pilot’s first phase to Amazon, Walmart, ShopRite, Safeway and Hy-Vee, as well as to online grocer FreshDirect and independent grocers Dash’s Market and Wright’s Markets. Rosie said its technology and development teams have prioritized SNAP online functionality with the help of its retailers, FNS and Fiserv since grocery partner Dash’s Market — now with four stores in the Buffalo, N.Y., area — was selected by the USDA to take part in the SNAP Online Purchasing Pilot.

Along with independent supermarket operators, Rosie serves as an e-commerce partner of leading grocery wholesalers, including Associated Food Stores, Associated Grocers Inc., Associated Wholesale Grocers, Bozzuto’s, C&S Wholesale Grocers, Piggly Wiggly Alabama Distributing Co. and URM Stores.

FEATURE — When one thinks of farming in Utah’s Dixie, the first crop that comes to mind is typically cotton, but another crop the first settlers in the area imported from the South was sorghum. In the early 1900s, LaVerkin boasted as many as seven sorghum mills.

Early settlers loved sorghum as a sweetener not only because it grew readily in Dixie and was economical, but with the Civil War raging, people in the West couldn’t obtain sugar.

Festivals are a good way to get to know the history of towns and to enjoy foods and crafts that townsfolk create, and LaVerkin’s “Winter Fest” is no exception. Held annually on the second weekend in December, the 2016 festival included a Mayor’s Walk during which Mayor Kerry Gubler related some of LaVerkin’s history.

The group walked west along Center Street in LaVerkin while Gubler explained the struggles of canal building and the daunting task of keeping water in the ditch. He also pointed out the area where fertile fields grew apricot, peach, pear and nut orchards.

Today an elementary school and small farms with homes both old and new line Center Street. One can only imagine the vast farms that once produced LaVerkin’s single most important cash crop – sorghum.

In Cherrie Gubler Naegle’s book “LaVerkin, Town of My Youth,” she writes that sorghum has a gourmet quality; it is not as intensely sweet as sugar or honey. Sorghum molasses is nutritious; high in iron, calcium and potassium. It is often confused with other molasses that are made from sugarcane or sugar beets as a byproduct.

Gubler showed his Winter Fest walking group two small stone houses built by early pioneers in 1899: the home of Henry Gubler, his great uncle, and that of Joseph Gubler, his great grandfather.

Henry Gubler became LaVerkin’s first mayor. Joseph Gubler avoided leadership positions but was highly respected by many. The Gublers always grew the best fruit and produced a lot of sorghum.

In 1916, four Model T’s could be seen driving around the dirt and gravel roads of LaVerkin. However, when it came to hauling farm produce, the horse-drawn wagon was transportation of choice. Joseph Gubler wanted nothing to do with a machine that couldn’t follow a few simple directions such as “whoa!” and “giddy up!”

Every fall, LaVerkin farmers headed north to Cedar City with loaded wagon trains to peddle sorghum packed in wooden barrels made of black willow or ash. Each stave was cut and hand-planed by Marcellus Wright, a carpenter and blacksmith from Hurricane.

The sorghum lappers, as Dixie residents were nicknamed, continued to use their horse-drawn wagons well into the ‘50s.

LaVerkin hasn’t entirely cornered the market on Southern Utah sorghum. John Kirkland, a burly, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, grows and produces sorghum today on his 30-acre farm situated in the middle of Washington City. Kirkland was born in St. George after his father moved the family from Georgia to Southern Utah shortly upon joining The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1940.

The Kirklands had a desire to grow southern crops, such as okra, sweet onions, butterbeans, peanuts and sugarcane. Producing sorghum was a perfect fit. Kirkland remembers Bill Stratton’s vast fields of sorghum being grown precisely where Quail Lake is today. At age 25, Kirkland, his father and many brothers helped Stratton harvest and process his molasses. They learned the trade.

Kirkland doesn’t make sorghum production a hobby. He calls himself a bootlegger, or at least a sorghum lapper. He produces sorghum because he loves it, he said, and because pure sorghum is hard to come by. His wife, Rosie, likes to make a barbecue sauce with sorghum, and they always add it to their bread.

Sorghum canes thrive in the long, hot growing season of Washington County. Canes grow 12 to 15 feet tall. The stalk is pressed for juice which is boiled down to syrup. One acre will produce approximately 200 gallons of syrup, perfect for smaller farms. However, sorghum production is still an exhausting and labor-intensive procedure.

The art of making sorghum was passed down from father to son. Only farmers with large families would dare produce sorghum. Seeds were hand-sown and irrigated lightly, and a horse-drawn drag was pulled over the land to cover the seeds. Cultivating to create furrows for irrigating, thinning the plants and weeding were tasks that seemed endless.

Today harvesting sorghum canes takes four workers in the field to cut the canes at ground level with machetes and to remove the red seed tassels. Three people skim and stay around the pan, Kirkland said.

Knowing the exact moment to stop cooking is crucial and using fresh cane resolute. Kirkland uses a candy thermometer to register the heated syrup to 226 F. If it cooks longer, it will turn to hard tack; if it cooks less time, it will sour.

At the mill, a boom was pulled by a team of draft horses that walked a circle around three steel drums that crushed the stalks. The worker that fed the canes into the crusher had to duck every time the boom passed by.

Kirkland uses his backhoe with an auger that turns the shaft that squeezes the juice out of the stocks. The juice flows into a barrel and from there into a series of five to seven vats that are assembled over a furnace. Previously using a wood-burning furnace, more recently Kirkland invented a burner to use waste oil he gathers from transmission shops. It takes a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of molasses.

“But the oil doesn’t smoke. It burns real clean,” Kirkland said.

The new invention sounds like a blowtorch because he uses a leaf blower to atomize the drip of oil.

Kirkland offers a limited supply of sorghum to the community at St. George’s first garden nursery, Kirkland’s Fence and Garden Center, which now sells seeds and fencing – and sorghum – just in time for gingerbread baking.

Most gingerbread recipes call for dark, strong molasses, and sorghum fills the bill. Through generations folks have enjoyed the zesty aroma of gingerbread wafting through their home. For many, the tradition of baking and designing a gingerbread house kicks off the holidays. And knowing that the crunchy spiced cookie will keep for several weeks, artists put their heart and soul into amazing creations.

The Christmas tradition of baking and making gingerbread houses is said to have originated in Germany during the 16th century. The elaborate cookie-walled houses became popular when the Brothers Grimm wrote the story of Hansel and Gretel.

In St. George, the “Gingerbread Tour” has become an annual competition. This year, 20 creations were on display in city’s historic downtown area from the end of November through George Streetfest, the city’s First Friday monthly event, when awards were given.

German Gingerbread Cake

Recipe by Kathy Lillywhite

Visiting tips

LaVerkin is 20 miles north of St. George. Take Interstate 15 to state Route 9 through Hurricane. SR-9 becomes State Street, and after approximately 3 miles, you will be in LaVerkin.

The Confluence Park with four entrances offers great hiking year round.

Read more: A Reserve, 4 trailheads, 2 creeks and a river all meet at Confluence Park.

Kirkland’s Fence and Garden Center, or Kirkland Sandy Acres Nursery, is located at 545 W. 400 North, St. George. Its hours of operation are Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Telephone 435-628-0844.

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About the series “Days”

“Days” is a series with St. George News contributor, feature writer and photographer Kathleen Lillywhite. She said:

I write my stories for people who say, ‘What is there to do around St. George?’ and for new folks just moving into this area.

Read more: See all of the features in the “Days” series.

Email: [email protected] | [email protected]

Twitter: @STGnews

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2016, all rights reserved.