Things to do / Travel Guide
- Numerous movies have been filmed in the southern Utah, with the striking beauty of red rock region used as backdrops in films like "Rio Grande" (1950) and the well-known "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (1988), "Thelma and Louise" (1990), "City Slickers II" (1994), and " Mission Impossible II" (2000).
- Kanab is considered Utah's "Little Hollywood." Over 70 movies and TV series have been filmed in the town, including “The Lone Ranger” (1956), “Maverick” (1994), and both the 1968 and 2001 versions of “Planet of the Apes.” In the 1930s the Parry Brothers, originally from Kanab, encouraged the Hollywood film industry to make Kanab a regular site for its movies, even providing a photo album of filming locations and the town's citizens, who could serve as extras. The brothers were Kanab's ambassadors to Hollywood, and their efforts certainly paid off.
- The ghost town of Grafton, near Zion National Park, was the site used for filming "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Photos of Grafton are often also used on the cover of books about ghost towns.
- In the Arizona Strip, cacti are populous for a reason. If you cut down a cactus in this sparse area, you can be imprisoned for up to 25 years.
- Numerous products have been named in honor of Moab, including the Nike Air Mowabb show and the Schwinn Moab Mountain Bike.
- The 1,960 miles of shoreline of Lake Powell is longer than the whole western coast of the continental U.S. The lake is 186 miles long and is the second-largest reservoir in the country, following Lake Mead.
- No town wants to be confused with a highly destructive 21,000-pound explosive device. That is why Moab city officials asked the U.S. government to change the acronym of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (M.O.A.B) to something a bit less similar to the town's name. This “Mother of all Bombs,” as it is also known, is one of the most powerful non-nuclear weapons ever designed, developed in 2002.
Moab's mayor wrote a letter to President Bush requesting the bomb be renamed, fearing it would damage the town's image. As of 2007, the bomb is still referred to as MOAB.
You can't name a place Dead Horse Point without a good explanation. The peninsula and State Park, located 2,000 feet above the Colorado River near Moab, was used by cowboys to capture and corral horses in the 1800s. The horses' only escape route was through a narrow, 30-yard neck of land usually fenced off but opened to unwanted horses left on the point to find their way out. According to legend, a group of mustangs were left on the Point, and for an unknown reason the horses remained and died of thirst. Dead Horse Point State Park offers some of the most breathtaking views in the region. Perhaps the horses were too transfixed by the sights to move.
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