Home Care In Hanksville, UT

A Hanksville innkeeper is in custody, facing dozens of charges for allegedly exploiting an elderly long-term guest who had entrusted him with her money.

Authorities say a search of the Hanksville Inn on Saturday also yielded evidence that Edward Alan Bahr illegally kept firearms and methamphetamine with intent to distribute.

Wayne County sheriff’s deputies executed a warrant in search of financial records and also found 8 grams of methamphetamine, scales, drug paraphernalia, a rifle, and ammunition of various calibers, according to Sheriff Dan Jensen. As a convicted felon, Bahr is not permitted to possess firearms.

The Hanksville Inn is just one of two hotels in the southern Utah town surrounded with such scenic wonders as Horseshoe Canyon, San Rafael Swell, Henry Mountains, Capitol Reef National Park, Factory Butte and Goblin Valley State Park. Located on State Road 24, Hanksville is about the only town on the 105-mile stretch between Green River and Torrey.

The town’s namesake inn is the subject of scathing reviews posted online by numerous customers unhappy with the sloppy condition of the motel and with management’s insistence on charging them full fare after canceling reservations. The motel’s website was down Tuesday and no one answered the phone.

Bahr’s alleged victim had moved to Hanksville two years ago after selling a home in Arizona, the sheriff said. She took up residence in the Hanksville Inn and put the proceeds of the home sale in a Loa bank. Last July, Bahr and the victim opened a joint checking account attached to the victim’s money, which was to be used for the victim’s needs, according to charging documents filed Tuesday in 6th District Court.

Over the next few months, Bahr, who had obtained power of attorney, siphoned about $50,000 from the account through a number of withdrawals the woman never authorized, according to Jensen.

“He had been traveling around on her dime,” the sheriff said.

The matter came to the sheriff’s attention in October, when bank staff became suspicious of Bahr’s handling of the account and reported it. Adult Protective Services became involved and helped relocate the woman to a safer residence.

Based on a report by a caseworker, sheriff’s investigators searched the bank’s records in January and uncovered “a pattern of the suspect transferring large amounts from the victim’s accounts and showed numerous withdrawals from ATM machines, car rentals, vacations, and large transfers [to] the suspect’s personal and business accounts.”

After several attempts by investigators to contact the victim, she spoke with sheriff’s Deputy Brandon Burr on Friday.

“The suspect had agreed to be her guardian and caretaker, but [she] had never given him permission to use her money for any other purpose than her care and medical costs,” states an affidavit Burr prepared in support of 33 counts filed against Bahr.

“When she confronted him about about his use of her money, he threatened to have her placed in a care center,” Burr’s affidavit states. “She states her fear of the suspect kept her from being willing to speak with me until recently and after she had moved out of the Hanksville Inn.”

She knew he had weapons and he had “intimated to her that he could use them if he felt threatened.”

At a bail hearing Tuesday, Judge Mark McIff ordered bail set at $200,000. Bahr remains in the Sevier County jail awaiting arraignment.

Mayor estimates $3 million in damages to the town but the agency usually requires more losses for aid.

(Cinder Player | Special to The Tribune) The southern Utah towns of Cedar City, Enoch, and Hanksville have been hit with at least six-foot flood waters, and community members there still feel the impacts of these floods days after experiencing these local disasters.

Last week, Hanksville saw flash floods as deep as six feet that wreaked havoc on homes, businesses, farms and even drowned 15 goat kids at a farm. Luckily, there were no fatalities.

The flood will cost around $3 million to clean up, according to Mayor Jeffren Pei. But while the damage is life-changing for many in the small town, it probably is not enough to get relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“We’ve talked to all the homeowners and the businesses about some help through FEMA, and I think we have to hit a threshold,” Mayor Jeffren Pei said. “Normally, they want a $4.2 million loss threshold [for an incident] just to be considered for application, and that’s not really a guarantee.”

To get residents help, Pei launched a GoFundMe fundraiser to pay for the town’s cleanup, with the focus now on removing mud from people’s homes and businesses. The fundraiser, which has a goal of $90,000, will help city residents immediately.

As of Wednesday, organizers of the online fundraisers were getting closer to their goal, with about $22,207 raised from 184 donors. Other donations have been sent to Lisa Wells, the town’s clerk and an emergency incident commander, who is recording the relief dollars for the town.

Hanksville is the third southern Utah town to experience extreme flooding this summer. In July and August, Cedar City and Enoch were inundated by six-foot waters and heavy mud, which required emergency declarations by the cities and Iron County. Both cities were denied any emergency FEMA funding that Hanksville is hoping to secure.

LaMiya Morrill, also an emergency incident commander for Hanksville, said that most of the damage happened outside the city, which will make FEMA’s loss threshold harder to meet.

“A lot of the hayfields and the power and the irrigation is outside of the city limits, but it is still part of our lives,” Morrill said. “It’s part of our community, but it’s not in the designated city limits, and so we can’t count any of that devastation, and we can’t use it toward trying to meet the goal” that FEMA requires.

Janna Wilkinson, Utah Division of Emergency Management’s State Mitigation and Recovery Manager, confirmed that the monsoon flooding in Cedar City and Enoch earlier this summer did not meet the FEMA thresholds.

“FEMA is a federal agency that can come in to deal with a certain scale of disaster,” Wilkinson said. “And so you know disasters are scaled up based on their size, and so there’s [disasters] that should be able to be handled at the local level. Others that should be able to be handled by the state, and then there are those that scale up to the level where they need federal intervention.”

When it comes to Hanksville’s flooding, Wilkinson said the losses were not as large as those caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Magna earthquake of 2020 and the Wasatch Front spring windstorms of 2020.

Wilkinson added that the state is still accepting applications for FEMA public assistance from residents impacted by the earthquakes and windstorms. Both of those disasters, she points out, were far more costly than the flooding incidents in Cedar City, Enoch and now Hanksville.

Even though no emergency funds exist in Utah for recovery, Wilkinson’s division is on the ground in Hanksville assisting community members. She also advised businesses and homeowners to consider getting additional insurance policies for floods, including coverage offered under the National Flood Insurance Program, before disaster strikes.

“Homeowners insurance does not usually cover natural disasters,” Wilkinson warned. “You have to get a separate policy or an additional rider to cover a natural disaster, such as flooding or earthquake.”

Stanley Alvey, whose family operates about five businesses in the town, said that the family’s private insurance would not cover the damage from the floods.

One of the family’s businesses, the Whispering Sands Motel was gearing up for a busy fall season. Now, reservations for half its rooms are blocked until next year after flooding damaged bedding, carpet and interior walls.

“We haven’t really given much consideration to our businesses yet, because I think the bigger picture [is] we’re trying to focus more on the people in the town and getting them on their feet before we can focus on the economy,” Alvey said.

While responding to flooding reported in Capitol Reef National Park on SR-24, Wayne County Deputy Taylor Record made his way into the Cainville and Hanksville areas to check for additional flooding. When he arrived, he reported severe flooding as several homes and businesses were taking on excessive amounts of water. (Photo: Teresa Brian, Wayne County Administrative Office Manager)

HANKSVILLE, Utah (KUTV) — While responding to flooding reported in Capitol Reef National Park on SR-24, Wayne County Deputy Taylor Record made his way into the Cainville and Hanksville areas to check for additional flooding. When he arrived, he reported severe flooding as several homes and businesses were taking on excessive amounts of water.

According to a recent press release from Hanksville officials, many cars and camp trailers were also damaged or swept away by the floodwaters.

Wayne County Sheriff's Office Search and Rescue was immediately called in to help with flood operations.

The release noted that a 500-gallon propane tank was "carried away" by the floodwater and released a "cloud of propane" which created a potentially dangerous hazmat situation.

Wayne County Fire Hazmat was called to respond but could not get to the area due to the extensive flooding.

RELATED: Flooding in south central Utah in parts of San Juan, Garfield and Wayne counties

Those who were already on the scene were able to shut off the tank and secure it from floating further away.

Utah Highway Patrol troopers also helped by diverting drivers away from floodwaters. Sevier County and Emery County offered to assist with evacuations and rescue operations.

Sevier County Sheriff Nathan Curtis dispatched an airboat and two flat bottom boats to check on areas isolated by high water levels in an effort to tackle potential water rescues.

Mayor Jeffren Pei said that all citizens were reported safe and accounted for, this included visitors staying at local motels. He has created a GoFundMe to help with damage costs for the town.

The press releases stated that the extent of the damage has yet to be fully determined and will be evaluated over the next several days.

HANKSVILLE — As the Memorial Day weekend and full-blown summer weather approaches, folks around here know what that means: more and more cars and trucks towing boats and watercraft pulling off for a gasoline fill-up before the final 65-mile push to Bullfrog Marina and the 1,960-mile shoreline of Lake Powell.

One station — Hollow Mountain Service — always seems to get its fair share of attention, and not just because it’s the first one you see as you approach town from the northeast or the west.

It also happens to be the world’s one and only gas station hollowed out of a mountain.

The entire interior of the convenience store — the beverage coolers, the cashier counter, the place where they sell the Lake Powell souvenirs and bait, the spacious restrooms, the storage area — was all once solid rock.

The story dates back to 1984 when a uranium miner from Green River, Utah, named Harry Thompson bought the corner lot at the intersection of highways 24 and 95 on the east end of town. He paid $1,200 for four and a half acres, almost all of which was a sandstone rock roughly the size of the Salt Lake Tabernacle.

After dynamiting the rock away to a point about 120 feet from the highway, the uranium miner had a brainstorm: Now that he had enough room for the gas pumps out front, why not build his convenience store inside the mountain?

He knew it was solid sandstone with high clay content and from his mining experience he was confident it would work.

The store was tunneled out in 60 days, and in the summer of '84 Hollow Mountain Service was born.

It was a small store at first, very small, so when Don Lusko, an early employee, bought out Harry in 1996 the first thing he did was make it bigger. More dynamite and more tunneling, and the size was greatly increased with the crown jewel being huge restrooms 100 feet into the rock.

“Before, we were really cramped. It used to be an employee would get fired for ordering one case too many of water,” jokes Don, who continues to own and run the station to this day.

Nowadays, he says, Hollow Mountain wouldn’t happen because of too much red tape.

But in the 1980s and 1990s, “it was still America down here. We had no planning, no zoning, no building inspectors, no building permits. Now we have all of that, and you’d never get enough certifiers to get this through.”

The building is safer than anything around, he contends, and the uniqueness of being inside a rock has indeed been a continual draw, he affirms.

“It’s the biggest novelty. If there are kids in the car they yell, ‘stop, stop.’ We’re Hanksville’s icon, I guess," he said. “Even the cars that don’t get gas stop on the highway and take pictures.”

The station has received attention from near and far. The German carmaker Mercedes-Benz featured it in its 1992 calendar, a hotel in Taiwan has it painted on a mural, and a B horror film called “Red Canyon” was filmed inside the station.

“Everybody’s curious,” says Celeste Sellers, Don's sister and one of several extended family members who help run the station. “We’re always getting Flintstones comments.”

And the next time she hears someone say "you work in a hole" will not be the first time.

The last few years, the only drawback has been the economy that’s slowed down the flow of gasoline-users headed to the lake. Ever since the 2008 recession, Don testifies, Hanksville hasn’t been the summertime boomtown it used to be. And could be again.

“There’s still water in the lake, come play in it,” he says, giving his best chamber of commerce pitch. “It’s just another hour from here, and there’s nothing in between; we’re the last stop.”

Fill up and come inside the rock for some T-shirts and beef jerky. The restrooms tunneled into the sandstone are free of charge.

Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays.

A CU Boulder grad student spent two weeks taking part in a simulated Mars mission in a Utah desert.

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HANKSVILLE, Utah — The red cliffs just west of Hanksville, Utah could easily be described as alien. It's the perfect setting to simulate a mission to the red planet of Mars.

CU Boulder grad student Shayna Hume, just spent two weeks in the desert with five other aspiring astronauts. She said the environment resembled Mars so closely, that it was easy to get into character.

“We would see plateaus, we would see strata, these beautiful red colors all along the rock," the 24-year-old said. "And one of us would stand very still and say wow if I didn’t know any better, I would say this is Utah. It’s just gorgeous.”

Astronauts call it an analog mission. Simulating life in space while in an Earth environment.

RELATED: Team of scientists led by CU Boulder observe largest ever recorded stellar flare

The Mars Desert Research Station is a replica space habitat in Utah, run by the Mars Society. The mission is to pursue the technology, operations, and science required for human space exploration.

Southeast Utah was chosen for its Mars-like terrain. Hume said there were even dust storms in the first few days of the mission.

“It really feels like you could be walking out onto the surface of another planet," said Hume. "It feels eerie, it feels empty in the most incredible way.”

Throwback Thursday to our first day at MDRS! We were able to walk on the surface of "Mars" without our spacesuits before the simulation began. Now, we only venture beyond the Station while fully protected by our EVA suits. pic.twitter.com/wBH30buPpJ

— Red Planet People (@RedPlanetPeople) April 15, 2021

The crew documented some of their mission on social media under the handle Red Planet People. They are active on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

With the exception of Earth gravity, everything else in the simulated two-week mission was all Mars. From the spacesuits to the science experiments. There was no contact with the outside world, no Netflix, and grocery stores.

“There really wasn’t time to breath and relax," said Hume, who was the First Officer of the group. "It felt like we were on the job. We had a whole list of things to do.”

RELATED: Listen to this: NASA releases audio of Mars helicopter in flight

The analog Mars habitat was shut down during the bulk of the pandemic. This was the first crew in more than a year.

Hume said these simulations help individuals prepare for careers in space, but more importantly it helps the astronaut community know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to life in space.

Living on Mars might still be distant, but she said the moon is close.

“So, 15 years from now I think we’ll be living and working on the moon and I really hope to be working on how to improve that life,” she said.