Home Care In Saint George, UT

There’s a harmful fungus lurking in the dirt around St. George. It enters people’s lungs when it becomes airborne, causing valley fever.

The fungus isn’t like the apocalyptic zombie strain made popular by the TV show and video game “The Last of Us.” But if left untreated, valley fever can still lead to hospitalization and even death, according to infectious disease specialist Ginamarie Foglia.

“Many people don't know what valley fever is,” the adjunct professor at Rocky Vista University College of Medicine in Ivins said. “People have to be aware when there's dirt in the air and it's being moved, they are at risk.”

And that’s a problem in fast-growing Washington County.

As development gobbles up more and more previously undisturbed desert landscapes, excavators and bulldozers are kicking that fungus into the air.

Construction workers may be the most vulnerable. And that becomes a health justice issue, University of Utah epidemiologist Katharine Walter said, because many of those workers may not have medical insurance or access to a doctor.

When the wind carries the dust, plenty of other people in the community are at risk, too.

“This major excavation of soil that is happening right now to create luxury developments, to create golf courses — that is also creating tremendous dust exposures,” Walter said.

The main way to mitigate the spread of construction dust is to spray it with water, which is a resource already in short supply in St. George.

Nationwide, valley fever diagnoses have increased dramatically since the late 1990s, as more Americans move to the edge of the arid landscapes the fungus calls home. Scientists know Utahns are getting sick with valley fever, Walter said, but there hasn’t been systematic research to confirm exactly where the fungus lives.

That’s why her team is studying dirt samples from around 40 sites in Washington County, which she said has Utah’s highest incidence of valley fever, known by the scientific name coccidioidomycosis. Her research has found the fungus in around 8% of the soil she has inspected countywide.

“It's worrying because a lot of the sites that we sampled that were positive are quite close to residential areas,” she said. “St. George is also a place that has an older population than the rest of Utah, so people might be at greater risk there than other places.”

Walter plans to use the soil sample data to model valley fever’s potential prevalence across Utah and create maps that can better predict fungal hotspots statewide.

The impact of climate change on the state’s temperatures could push the fungus into parts of central and northern Utah where it has historically been less common. And if droughts become more intense and prolonged, it could create conditions that make dust storms more pervasive.

As President Donald Trump’s administration cuts the budgets and staff at federal scientific agencies, though, Walter said it is becoming increasingly difficult to do this kind of research.

“We won't be able to know if valley fever is in Washington County unless the NIH [National Institutes of Health] can fund that work, and we won't be able to communicate that to the public health officials in the state of Utah if the Department of Health and Human Services is defunded.”

Public awareness about valley fever is already lower in Utah than in other parts of the Southwest, Walter said. So, she and Foglia will share the soil sample results during a lecture at the Kayenta Center for the Arts in Ivins on May 20.

Getting valley fever information in front of the public could ward off infections before they happen.

“I believe prevention is better than trying to cure something. It's a lot cheaper, and it's something that we're in control of,” Foglia said. “What I do — and what I recommend patients do — is, when there's a lot of wind, wear a mask.”

Even many health care professionals don’t have valley fever on their radar, Walter said, which can lead to misdiagnosis.

“The goal is not to perpetuate fear of the environment or fear of going outside, but it's just to know that this is part of the environment in southern Utah,” she said, “and also to raise awareness among health care providers so that people can get diagnosed and treated early.”

ST. GEORGE, Utah — When it comes to croissants, cake, and nosh, there are arguably few places as popular in St. George as Farmstead Bakery. But something has changed.

"Am I in the right place?" asked Michael Bennett when visiting on Friday. "Do they still have all the same great food that we love?"

We heard the questions, so we set out to answer what exactly has happened to Farmstead Bakery?

"We had to change our name for legal reasons," explained co-owner Chris Connors. "There was a Farmstead that existed in Northern California, and they were unwilling to do a, like, a co-license with the trademark. So it's just one of those things.

"It's business. I get it."

The bakery's new name is Bonrue, combining the French words for good street. In 2021, Connors moved here from Las Vegas to start the shop and said Bonrue has a French flair.

Just don’t tell that to the French.

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"We have had plenty of French-speaking customers and guests come up to us and say, 'that is incorrect French.' We know that. It's a made-up word," he shared."

Connors explained that a big reason for the change is plans to expand to more locations. Bonrue already has additional bakeries in Hurricane and Springdale. But the change isn't cheap as it’s costing the bakery about $80,000 to make the switch between signage, new boxes and new T-shirts and hats. And to also let customers know that, no, they’re not closing.

Even with the tremendous effort, the new name may take a while to take hold.

"I've caught myself one or two times," admitted Connors. "And that's just going to take time. The transition will take time."

Despite the change, Bonrue doesn't expect it'll keep anyone away.

"We do get a decent amount of people from the courthouse. I'd say that on the weekends, we get a lot of people traveling; they've seen us on TikTok, Instagram, all the social media pages. So they have to stop by, and then once they've come once, they're returning customers every time they come back," said Bonrue general manager Brooklynn Bundy.

Customers said the bakery, by any other name, still smells sweet

St. George • At first glance, southern Utah’s largest city would seem to have little in common with Saint George, the patron saint of England long eulogized in Christian mythology as a dragonslayer.

After all, St. George was named after Mormon pioneer George A. Smith, an apostle and first counselor to President Brigham Young. And most city residents are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not Catholics or Protestants.

The closest thing the Washington County seat has to a fire-breathing dragon is the area’s unrelenting summer heat – until recently.

Since the arrival of “the dragon” in St. George nearly four months ago, thousands of fearless city residents and visitors have taken steps to scale the beast before it can slay them. Three hundred and thirty-three of them, to be exact, or 666— the number of the beast — should would-be dragonslayers decide to scale it up and down.

Welcome to “The Stairs,” the official name of the tortuously long and steep staircase at Tech Ridge that has thousands of runners and walkers huffing and puffing.

(Tech Ridge) The Stairs at Tech Ridge illuminated at night in St. George in February 2025.

“It’s a monster, that’s for damn sure,” gasped Utah Tech University student Dylan Johnson whose demeanor was anything but devil-may-care as he surmounted the grueling steps for the third time. “Some say it is the stairway to heaven, but I think it is more like the primrose path to hell.”

Indeed, the hellacious stairs go by many different names, according to Brad Buhanan, community engagement director of Tech Ridge, a 180-acre, mixed-use technology park that overlooks the city atop a butte that once fielded St. George’s airport.

“Everybody has a different nickname for it...,” Buhanan said. “The most known name is ‘The Stairs.’ Others refer to it as the ‘Dragon,’ ‘Dragon’s Tail’ or ‘Tail of the Dragon.’ To keep it simple, we call them ‘The Stairs.’”

Whatever superlative – or expletive – is applied to them, The Stairs have elevated Utah’s standing in steps. It easily outpaces Brigham Young University’s infamous 192-step Heart Attack Hill stairs adjacent the Stephen L. Richards Building. It dwarfs the tall stairs at any of the state’s basketball arenas or football fields, according to Buhanan‘s calculations.

“We have the longest continuous stairs in the state … and one of the top five in the world because of the quality of our steps, " said Buhanan, noting all the cement steps in St. George’s upscale stairs were individually and meticulously poured and molded, whereas some of the longer ones in the world use railroad ties that look downright shoddy or cheap by comparison.

All told, Tech Ridge’s Dragon stretches 630 feet and climbs 171 feet in elevation from the foot to the top of the mesa where the technology park is situated. Buhanan said Isaac Barlow, founder of Tech Ridge, dreamed up “The Stairs” when he was looking to construct infrastructure to drain water off the mesa to the basin below and decided to put a staircase on top of it to hide the scar.

“He wanted to build something that would help the community together and bring value to the people who live, work and visit Tech Ridge,” Buhanan said.

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Blood, sweat and tears

Construction on The Stairs began in the summer of 2024. Construction workers started atop the mesa and worked their way down, fitting and fashioning each step by hand. They also installed the riprap, or large rocks, made up of crushed lava on both sides of the staircase. A stainless steel rail with built-in lights divides the stairs from top to bottom and illuminates them at night.

“There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears that went into [building] these stairs,” he said.

Barlow ultimately shelled out $1 million to build the steps, which perch on municipal land.

The area’s grand staircase premiered on Jan. 25 at St. George’s inaugural Dragon’s Tail Stair Climb Challenge. Scores of entrants showed up to compete and test their speed and endurance. Now, hundreds of exercise buffs of all ages, from Utah and across the country, scale the dragon each day and well into the evening.

For Dammeron Valley resident Ruth Ann Pilney and Francine Maas, a Catholic nun visiting from Vermont, rising to the challenge of the dragon was as exhausting as it was elevating. For the lifelong friends, climbing The Stairs was a high point of their joyous reunion.

“I like physical exercise,” said Maas, a member of the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa order. “When I went down the stairs I started to feel my legs [get tired] but my breathing was OK. On the way up, though, I had to stop and breathe every 50 steps. But I’m 79, and I praise the Lord that we can still do this at our age.”

(Tech Ridge) People ascend and descend the Stairs at Tech Ridge in St. George in March 2025.

For his part, St. George paramedic and physician assistant Corbin Allred says the steps help him prep for the summer hikes he enjoys in Utah’s High Uintas and Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains. They also help him cope with the physical demands of caring for a daughter who has spina bifida and is paralyzed from her chest down.

Asked what he calls The Stairs he climbs three times a week, Allred said he doesn’t have a nickname for it.

“All I know,” he said, “is that it is hell every other day.”

Climate change shapes where and how we live. That's why NPR is dedicating a week to stories about solutions for building and living on a hotter planet.

ST. GEORGE, Utah — Water scarcity, population growth and climate change are on a collision course in the American West.

That's clear in cities like St. George, a desert community surrounded by stunning red rock cliffs and mesas in Utah's southwest corner. The population is booming and climate change is making heat more intense and rain less reliable. But local leaders have a plan to stretch the area's water supply by turning to its sewage — a solution that could help other drought-stricken cities, too.

That plan started with a simple math problem.

"All the water has been used. It's been called for. But yet, we have one of the fastest-growing communities in the Western United States," said Zach Renstrom, general manager of the Washington County Water Conservancy District in St. George.

"So, we're looking at hundreds of thousands of people moving to our community," said Renstrom, "and we have no extra water for them."

As recently as 2021, this sun-drenched outdoor recreation hub was the fastest-growing metro area in the U.S. The local population, now just over 200,000, has more than doubled since 2002. The University of Utah projects it could double again by 2050.

That's where the sewage plan comes in.

At a construction site just east of St. George, Renstrom walked toward a maze of rebar and concrete that's slated to become a new wastewater reclamation plant by the end of 2025. Once complete, it'll take effluent from local kitchens and bathrooms and clean it with screens, bacteria and UV light.

In the near term, the treated wastewater will be sprayed on lawns and farm fields. But that will free up water for homes, too, because the county currently uses some of its drinking water for outdoor irrigation. Within two decades, Renstrom expects the district will start sending the clean water from its reclamation plants directly into the drinking supply.

Reusing water that would have otherwise flowed downstream to Lake Mead — the nation's largest reservoir — is the centerpiece of the district's long-term water plan. But it will come at a steep cost: over a billion dollars.

"Traditionally, I would say that you would have to be a very large, large, large municipality to be able to afford that massive infrastructure," Renstrom said. "But now we're getting to the point where, even small communities like us, it's our only option."

St. George's quandary is a microcosm of the challenges cities face across the Western U.S. as overuse and drought strain the Colorado River and the basin's seven states fight over how the river's water gets distributed in the future.

Expanding wastewater reuse operations regionwide could go a long way toward easing that pressure, said UCLA water researcher Noah Garrison. There just needs to be a lot more of it.

"One of the reasons why we need to be investing in wastewater recycling now is that this isn't some hypothetical future concern we're dealing with," Garrison said. "We already are seeing water scarcity and water stress in all of these regions, and developing out wastewater recycling does take time."

While other places like Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco recycle a lot of their sewage already, Utah reuses less than 1% of its wastewater statewide. A recent analysis Garrison co-wrote suggested that if all basin states start reusing more than half of their wastewater — as Nevada and Arizona already do — it could make up for around a third of the region's expected water shortfall.

A visit to St. George's main water source, the Virgin River, highlights the urgency.

This waterway carved the towering red rock canyon in nearby Zion National Park. But after a historically dry winter, the section snaking through St. George has become shallow enough to walk across without getting more than your ankles wet.

"This is it," district conservation manager Doug Bennett said as he motioned toward the meager flow. "This is the lifeblood of the entire region."

In addition to reusing water, St. George and neighboring communities have adopted conservation rules in recent years that nearly eliminate grass on new development. The district also pays residents up to $2 per square foot to rip out their irrigated lawns — a strategy other cities from Denver to Fresno to Spokane have tested, too.

The southwest Utah program has incentivized homeowners and businesses to remove more than 2 million square feet of grass since launching in late 2022. But Bennett knows it has a lot of room left to grow, especially among local golf courses. That's where the region's record dry conditions this year could help.

"One of the biggest threats to implementing all these programs is complacency," Bennett said. "A drought can be a big motivator for people to say, 'What can I do to help?'"

Making growth sustainable in a dry, hot, booming place like St. George may be a tall task, but Bennett believes it can work. He saw it in his previous job at the water district in Las Vegas.

Just 120 miles to the southwest, Las Vegas is St. George's glitzy neighbor, and it has been reusing wastewater on a large scale for decades.

At the Clark County Water Reclamation District's main plant, Strategic Services Manager Bud Cranor creaked open a tall, metal door. Behind it flowed some of the 100 million gallons of sewage this plant treats each day.

"Right here is all the poop from every casino, every business," Cranor said. "It's like every little 12-year-old boy's dream is working at this place, because you get to make poop jokes all day."

But for a city in the desert, it's no laughing matter.

"What we do here is absolutely vital to this valley's survival," he said.

Squeezing clean water from this sea of sludge has helped the Vegas metro population more than double in the past two decades. It now has nearly 2.4 million people. Conservation efforts have played a big role there, too. Even as Vegas welcomed hundreds of thousands of new residents, the area decreased its total water consumption — a concept known as decoupling.

As more communities work to ensure their residents have water for the future, Cranor believes what Vegas has accomplished can be a neon-glowing case study.

"That will become more and more of a priority as it becomes a scarcer resource," he said. "So cities, if they're not already thinking about it, they're going to have to start thinking about it more."

Now that Las Vegas, Los Angeles and other major cities have proven the concept of wastewater reuse, Newsha Ajami has seen a growing trend of smaller communities following their lead. She's a water researcher with Stanford University and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

When it comes to scaling up reuse, Ajami said the technology is not the main limiting factor. Rather, "it's often a policy problem or sort of governance structure that needs to change to embrace some of these solutions."

Cities may face their own localized challenges, too. In St. George, one of the limiting factors is the need to build additional reservoirs that can store the water its reuse plants clean. Las Vegas sends its recycled water into massive Lake Mead, which is well under half-full as Western megadrought and overuse shrink large reservoirs across the West.

Ultimately, Ajami said the extent to which wastewater reuse can allow a city to grow is up to its leaders, its budget and its willingness to adapt. For some communities, that may mean prioritizing pricey water infrastructure updates. She also envisions a future where reuse becomes decentralized, like a neighborhood having its own microplant or even in-home systems.

"You can do it smart," she said. "For example, if you build new buildings, new homes, and say, 'OK, you know what? You're going to connect the shower water to toilets.'"

Ajami compares it to the adoption of solar panels on home roofs in recent years. As those become more common, they help a city reduce the pressure on its power grid. Expanding decentralized reuse could potentially do something comparable for a city's water supply.

"That is definitely the future," Ajami said. "It might not be here now, but in the next 10-15 years, I can see more and more of that happening."

The wastewater treatment plant being built near St. George is a sign of the changing times, too.

When Renstrom studied water management in engineering school 25 years ago, he said the biggest question about sewage was how to get rid of it.

"In my career, that has completely changed," Renstrom said, "where now, people are fighting over this."

Communities like his are counting on that sewage to sustain them into a hotter, drier future.

Posted 6:05 PM, Jun 02, 2025

ST. GEORGE, Utah — Anyone who shops at the Smith's Market on Bluff in St. George knows Gary Saling, the kind 80-year-old grocery bagger.

What they don’t know he once served Hollywood royalty and designed multi-million-dollar mansions for Wall Street financiers. But he now works to pay off medical bills for the love of his life.

Now, the hard-working Saling is getting a community assist from residents who wonder why he still has to work.

He says he got his workaholic nature from his single mom, who was the head waitress at the famous Victor Hugo’s restaurant in Beverly Hills.

Saling worked three jobs himself in high school, including bagging and delivering groceries in Laguna Beach, California. Saling remembers delivering groceries to a woman he said had a gravely voice and a long cigarette: Actress Bette Davis.

"She said, 'Because your mom has waited on me at Victor Hugo... How I know you're her son is you're just as much of a workaholic as she is,'" Saling said.

That work ethic served him well throughout his career as an architect, designing multi-billion-dollar homes for elite clients. He even made Architectural Digest's top 100 list.

One of his notable projects was a three-story mansion on the coast for Boyd Jefferies, who built the Jefferies Investment Group before being implicated in the insider trading scandals of the 1980s. The home featured a glass floor above the ocean.

"And he goes, 'I love it. It's like an E-ticket ride at Disneyland,'" Saling said.

After his first wife left him in the 1980s, leaving him to raise two sons alone, Saling's life changed when he spotted Carol at a stoplight in 1991.

"I mean, it was the exact instant. We both raised our sunglasses," Saling said, describing their first encounter.

It turned out they had been frequenting the same store for coffee for decades. When the wife of the store's owner discovered this coincidence, she arranged for them to meet.

"She comes around the corner and she's crying and she goes 'Gary, are you telling me you finally ran into Carol?'" Saling recalled, tears in his eyes.

The store owner's wife had them sit on a bench, where their relationship quickly blossomed.

"We fell in love with each other on the bench because we ended up sitting there for three hours," Saling said.

Their love story took a difficult turn in January 2017 when Carol was diagnosed with Sundowner's syndrome, a form of dementia. The couple relocated to southern Utah to be near a neurologist.

"The neurology was covered by Medicare. What wasn't covered was the promise that I would keep her at home and never put her in a nursing home," Saling said.

Carol, an artist, died in 2021, but Saling's love for her continues. Unfortunately, so do the medical bills. He still owes $80,000, which is why he continues to work at 80 years old.

Duana Johnson, who runs a small ministry in town, noticed Saling bagging groceries and decided to help.

"I saw Gary bagging groceries, and I thought, 'What's this guy? Why is this elderly man still here?'" Johnson said.

Johnson organized the Gary Saling Donation account at the State Bank of Southern Utah and set up a Venmo account. So far, they've raised about $2,000, with half of that coming in just the past weekend.

"I'm trying to raise enough money for him to be able to retire and not have to worry about working anymore," Johnson said.

Saling is uncomfortable discussing his need for help and never expected to be the focus of a fundraiser or to still be working at 80. But he stands by his decision to care for his wife at home.

"There is no way I'm a hero. I am not an angel, and I'm certainly not a saint. I made the promise to keep her at home and never put her in a nursing home because I took vows," Saling said.

Anyone who would like to contribute can do so via Venmo: @HelpGaryRetire and the code is 2956.