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MOAB |
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Founded in the late 1800s, MOAB was hardly a speck until the 1950s,
when prospector Charlie Steen discovered uranium in the nearby hills.
When the ensuing mining boom finally waned, the conservative hold of
Moab's industrialists and landowners waned with it, and the town threw
in its lot with tourism. In barely ten years, it has transformed itself
into the Southwest's number one adventure-vacation destination.
Moab still isn't a large town - the population has yet to reach ten
thousand - and neither is it an attractive one. The setting is what
matters. With two national parks on its doorstep, plus millions more
acres of public land, Moab is an ideal base for outdoors enthusiasts. At
first, it was a mecca for mountain bikers , lured by the legendary
Slickrock Bike Trail . Then the jeep drivers began to turn up, and the
whitewater rafting companies moved in. These days it's almost literally
bursting, all year, with legions of Lycra-clad vacationers from all over
the world.
Perhaps the main reason Moab has grown so fast is that out-of-state
visitors tend to find Utah's other rural communities so irredeemably
boring. As soon as Moab emerged from the pack, it became a beacon in the
desert, attracting tourists ecstatic to find a town that stayed up after
dark. Moab amounts to little more than a few miles of motels,
restaurants and bars, but that's enough to make it the only southern-Utah
town where you can stay for a week and still feel that you haven't seen
everything, and everyone, a dozen times. The only sight-seeing to speak
of is provided by the Moab Skyway , an incongruous new chairlift that
climbs a thousand feet above town to the northern tip of the Moab Rim,
for superb views across the Colorado to Arches and beyond (daily
9am-9pm; $8)
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from $104.88
USD