Interstate through the Virgin River Gorge opened in 1973

                                             The Virgin River Gorge opened in 1973.

IT is probably the curviest portion of I-15 anywhere -- the Virgin River Gorge -- and it opened in the winter of 1973.
This 29 1/2 mile section of interstate highway is taken for granted today, but it saves some 45 minutes in travel time over the old route -- and believe it or not, it is considered a safer route than its predecessor,  the "Utah Hill" (or "Old Highway 91), that started in Santa Clara and ended up in Beaver Dam, Arizona.
In fact, that old stretch of highway produced 23 fatalities just between 1968 and the Virgin River Gorge opening five years later.
The Virgin River Gorge section of I-15 was dedicated on Dec. 21, 1973 (and had opened to traffic a week or so prior).
According to the Iron County Record newspaper of Dec. 20, 1973, it was the most expensive stretch of rural interstate highway ever built at the time -- costing $61 million (or almost $337 million in 2017 dollar values).

                   The Virgin River Gorge is mountain grades and curves.

An engineering marvel, the highway passed through some sections of gorge that were only 150 feet and others with 2,000-foot high mountain cliffs rising up.
This section of I-15 directly connects St. George, Utah with Littlefield, Arizona.
Governor Calvin L. Rampton said during the highway's dedication that Arizona State officials had to be greatly credited for their help on the highway construction. Even though it was a landlocked portion of their state where the road went, Arizona was a key component in its completion.
The highway stretch's completion also required assistance from Nevada -- a rare three state effort.
Flashfloods and quicksand in the Gorge made construction difficult. It required more than 4 years of work, plus 5 bridges over the Virgin River and 12 places where the river had to be rerouted to accommodate the roadway.
A helicopter pilot was killed in 1969 after he crashed in the Virgin River Gorge while doing survey work there. A special dune buggy was brought in from Texas to aid in the surveying of the Gorge.
Although ALL of the Gorge is NOT in Utah, the Utah Department of Transportation often does a lot of the maintenance on the freeway there, for Arizona.

              The Virgin River Gorge section of I-15 is an engineering marvel.

When I-15 almost took a different path in Davis and Weber counties

                            Looking down on a section of Highway 89 in Layton in 2015.


By Lynn Arave

Imagine a mountain hugging Interstate-15 in North Davis County and Southern Weber County.

I-15 from Farmington to Ogden almost went a different route – Highway 89, instead of today’s western route, near Highway 91.

The Ogden Chamber of Commerce had pushed hard for the Highway 89 freeway option. After all, that offered the most direct access to Ogden City and Weber State College.

However, an independent study revealed that it would be far more costly to build I-15 along the Highway 89 corridor. Also, the western route option offered more direct access to the military installations in the Top of Utah.

And, once a Highway 89 aligned freeway reached Ogden, where would it go northward from there, without impacting large sections of homes and businesses?

According to Glen M. Leonard in his book, “A History of Davis County,” The Federal Interstate Highway Act of 1956 expanded federal subsidies for major state highways and meant Washington paid 95 percent of the costs of such superhighways. So, it wasn’t “if” freeways would be built in Utah, it was just “when.”

Leonard’s book states that increased traffic between Salt Lake City and Ogden is why the Utah State Road Commission chose a six-mile section in south Davis County to be Utah's first highway built to interstate standards.

“In a ceremony in North Salt Lake in January 1958, Governor George D. Clyde launched the project by driving a bulldozer into Amasa Howard's ninety-year-old dairy barn to clear a route for the new $7.3-million segment,” Leonard wrote. “Utah's first section of six-lane divided interstate highway reached north to Pages Lane and was completed in 1962.”

However, original plans did not include any interchanges between Farmington and Bountiful. Centerville had to lobby to eventually gain its own freeway access.

Bids for constructing I-15 in the Ogden area opened in 1963, split into several segments.

After three years work, I-15 from south Layton to Ogden opened on Nov. 23, 1966. A huge advantage with this section meant that Main Street (Highway 91) would no longer be so congested with commuters during shift changes at Hill Air Force Base.

                              I-15 in Layton.

The I-15 route north of Layton often followed the abandoned Bamberger Railroad route.

On Dec. 12, 1976, the section of I-15 from the Box Elder-Weber County line to Perry was completed after more than four years of work. This meant I-15 was now continuous from Layton to southern Box Elder County.

However, the Lagoon to Layton section of the interstate was the last section finished in the Ogden area.

The widening and resurfacing of the existing section of Highway 91 from Layton to Lagoon was not open until 1977 through a $10 million project. This finally meant uninterrupted freeway travel existed between Juab County on the south and Box Elder County on the north. Future projects would expand the freeway both north and south.

Leonard also noted that I-15 in Davis County produced a housing boom too.

“The communities along the freeway's route rightly envisioned a new incentive for growth,” Leonard wrote. “Interstate 15 made the greatest difference in the Centerville, Farmington, and Kaysville areas, which had lagged behind other parts of the county because of their distance from both Ogden and Salt Lake City.”

He continued: “Also, as in the Syracuse region, a stable agricultural population existed in the central core. Small subdivisions began appearing in these central cities about the time the interstate began reaching into the county from the south. Suburban sprawl brought the first, small subdivision to Syracuse in that same decade.”

Utahns probably take I-15 for granted today, but inter-city travel in the Top of Utah wasn’t nearly as quick or convenient before the freeway came along.

(-Originally published on-line and in print in the Ogden Standard-Examiner, by Lynn Arave, on April 23-24, 2015.)

-NOTE: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net

S.L. to Los Angeles: The Most Difficult Wagon Road in American History

         A dirt road near the Beaver Dam Wash today follows where wagons used to roll 160 years ago.

By Lynn Arave

THE next time you travel from Salt Lake City, or anywhere in Utah, to Los Angeles, appreciate what an easy drive you have in likely an air-conditioned vehicle.
In Mormon Pioneer times of the mid-19th Century, this was likely the most difficult wagon road in the nation.
In fact, that's the subject of a 2001 book, "The Arduous Road: Salt Lake to Los angeles, The Most Difficult Wagon Road in American History," by Leo Lyman and Larry Reese (Lyman Historical Research and Publishing, Victorville, Calif.)

Why today I can leave my home in Layton, Utah at 4:40 a.m., take two hours of stops along the way and reach Anaheim/Disneyland, California by 4 p.m. Pacific time.
It's a 10 hour and 16 minute non-stop drive of some 690 miles from S.L. to Los Angeles today.
In pioneer times, this was a many weeks trip in some dry, harsh territory -- the deserts of southern Nevada and eastern California.
What's perhaps more interesting is that the pioneer routes used didn't always follow near where today's I-15 goes.
That's because pioneer routes followed water sources, not always direct routes.
For example, while today's I-15 does roughly follow where the pioneers from Salt Lake to Parowan, it changes a lot after there.
Pioneer routes turned west past Summit and headed for Antelope Spring, winding down past Veyo and Gunlock -- by passing St. George. (It wasn't until 1857 that a route through St. George was used.)

                                       The forbidding desert.

After there, today's I-15 route was basically followed, with some deviations of 3-5 miles to the north or south. Next, the route to Las Vegas is pretty close for both routes.
However, it is from Vegas on where the route really changes.
Wagon parties headed northwest for several springs and were at times 30 miles north of today's I-15 in different areas.
 Pioneers missed Jean, Nevada and did not climb that steep hill outside Stateline into California. The old-timers also bypassed Baker, California completely. 
The two roads connect again just north of Barstow.
The pioneer route also didn't descent into the Los Angeles Basin by way of Cajon Pass, as I-15 does today. Wagon routes went down further south by way of Coyote-Crowder Canyon.

-NOTE: The author, Lynn Arave, is available to speak to groups, clubs, classes or other organizations about Utah history at no charge. He can be contacted by email at: lynnarave@comcast.net  

'Scrambled Egg Curve' and 'Utah Hill' -- Forgotten Obstacles

              The Devil's Gate I-80 span over the Weber River today.

EVER hear of "Scrambled Egg Curve" or "Utah Hill"?

In the high-tech 21st century, travelers speed through two notorious Intermountain canyons -- Weber Canyon and the Virgin River Gorge -- on freeways with little thought of how restrictive these paths were prior to the interstate.

In fact, travel through the Virgin River Gorge didn't exist prior to 1973 and the opening of I-15 there. Motorists spent up to twice as long (and trucks even more) traversing the alternate Highway 91 route west of Santa Clara, which climbed the notorious "Utah Hill."

For Weber Canyon, the pre-Interstate 84 days included Devil's Gate ("Scrambled Egg Curve,") a bottleneck in a critical highway and a nightmare for truckers.

In 1847, Devil's Gate was such an obstacle that the Mormon Pioneers decided to enter the Salt Lake Valley through Emigration Canyon instead. If this had not been so, This is the Place monument might have been in a very different location.

Heinrich Lienhard, a frontiersman in T.H. Jefferson's traveling party, described their Aug. 6, 1846, wagon passage through Devil's Gate as the wildest part of their journey across the western wilderness.

It wasn't until 1856 that Thomas Jefferson Thurston and other prospective settlers built and opened a narrow road from the west side and through the lower portion of Weber Canyon and Devil's Gate into the Morgan Valley.

Families entering or leaving Devil's Gate (not to be confused with "Devil's Slide," some 20 miles to the east) by horse and buggy would send one family member ahead on foot to stop traffic bound the other way on the one-lane route while they passed through the narrow, natural gate.


The road through Devil's Gate was widened dramatically in the automobile age, but it also gained a new nickname — "Scrambled-Egg Curve," because of the many accidents involving egg transports there, as well as spills of oil, livestock and vegetables. The spot had more accidents than any other part of the canyon.

For example on Feb. 3, 1949, a Deseret News headline read: "Weber Canyon blocked by egg cargoes," as two semitrailer trucks overturned near Devil's Gate, because of the sharp turn and icy conditions. A month earlier, another semi had overturned there, blocking the narrow canyon road.

After the wet winter of 1952, floodwaters cut off travel through Devil's Gate for weeks. Commuters had to park their cars on the east side and walk around Horseshoe Bend to get rides to work from the west side.

In the early 1960s it took explosives and heavy equipment to clear the way for two 583-foot-long concrete bridges during construction of Interstate 80-North (now I-84), finally conquering the bugaboo of Devil's Gate and Horseshoe Bend. It cost $2.5 million (more than $18 million in today's dollars) to build the three-mile section of interstate near Devil's Gate. The road completely bypasses the bend itself.

Truckers during the construction process were told to keep their windows shut and use the air conditioning -- no matter what. That's because there were sometimes rattlesnakes lurking in the debris they were hauling away and more than one truck driver got spooked when a rattler crawled to the cab and stuck his head inside the window!

--Construction on the I-15 freeway through the Virgin River Gorge cost $10 million per mile (almost $50 million a mile in today's dollars.) It was the most expensive rural freeway in the nation at the time.
Required were five long bridges over the Virgin River, as well as rechanneling the water 12 different times to accommodate the approximate 18-mile section of freeway through the gorge itself. More than four miles of freeway travel right over the original river bed.

High winds, flash flooding and quicksand hindered construction. A helicopter surveying ther area crashed in 1969, killing the pilot. A dune buggy from Texas was eventually brought in to traverse the rugged gorge during early construction.

I-15 in the Virgin River Gorge finally opened, about 25 years ago, on Dec. 14, 1973 after a decade of work.

The Virgin River Gorge traverses a remote section of the Arizona strip. It is the most vital link between Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

A million cubic yards of granite were removed in several locations to rechannel the river.

Utah, Arizona and Nevada opposed the proposed route through the Virgin River Gorge as early as 1955, because the first plans included just a two-lane road and sections without passing capability for as long as four miles at a time.

The three states supported and eventually got a wider, four-lane highway approved.

The Virgin River Gorge is a scenic area and cliffs rise as high as 500 feet above the interstate.

-"Still beautiful, but mighty dangerous" was a Dec. 1, 1979 headline in the Washington County News of St. George. The story stated how almost five years after the curvy steep road opened, it had yet to have a major snow accident. However, that streak came to an ended on Jan. 26 of that year when there were a dozen vehicles which slid off the freeway in the gorge and three people were injured.
The story said the storm had a perfectly icy combination of cold and snow, creating black ice in the gorge, so bad that "the surface of the freeway was so slick that you couldn't stand up without support." This all happened in the often shaded, south end of the gorge, located in Arizona.




(-Distilled from an article by Lynn Arave, originally published in the Deseret News on Jan. 19, 2009.)