St. George with Jared and Merle

We didn't remember that there were so many fun things to see in St. George!  Our good friends, Jared Christopher and Merle, were at a conference in Vegas in mid-February.  They dropped by St. George to spend the nights of February 16 and 17, 2018, with us and to sight-see all day Saturday.

First stop was Silver Reef, a ghost town which produced $50 million in silver during the 1880s.  Back then, there were 10,000 residents and dozens of hotels, bars, and brothels.  Silver Reef has now been baked clean, with just a museum and a few antique buildings to mark its glory days.

 The scenery around Silver Reef is spectacular.

 The museum has treasures depicting the 1880s and 1890s, including a bronze statue of the stage which passed through Silver Reef, and the original bank safe and stage lockbox.

 There is a reconstructed mine shaft beneath the museum.  On our tour, the docent described the donkeys that pulled carts through the mine shaft and the miners who followed the silver lodes, hacking out rock rich in silver.

 The name of this restaurant is/was the "Cosmopolitan."  Not so appropriate anymore.

 The jail stood alone on the hill.

 St. George is home to many artists.  Silver Reef houses the studio of the creator of this Civil War statue.

 Next stop was the Johnson Farm Museum, where we saw the dinosaur footprints dug up by a developer as he put in a subdivision.  I love museum gift shops.  I brought home the book, "Your Inner Fish," about how our body mimics structures from earth's earliest creatures.

 Dinsoaurs like this fellow roamed St. George in the days when it was on the edge of a tropical, inland sea.

 The museum housed huge slabs of rock, with the dinosaur footprints ranging for many feet across them.

 Dave then gunned our SUV to the top of the cliff near his parents' old home, where a huge arrow guided the earliest airplanes, in the 1920s, on their way from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City.

 Dave's dad designed and placed this marker, explaining the huge arrow and its history.

 We also took Jared and Merle to the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where Mormon settlers in the late 1850s took their revenge against a wagon train of pioneers from Arkansas and Missouri, making their way to California.  The entire wagon train, other than children and babies, was massacred.  The Mormons had been abused in Missouri not too long before, and some of them could not forget.  Just a few years ago, the Mormon Church helped build the monument and made peace with and an apology to the descendants of those long-ago victims.