I-15 in the Virgin River Gorge

I-15 in the Virgin River Gorge 

by Drew Oetzel

In 1997 Kit, Dennis, and I set out on the Rainbow Bright/Assassination Location Tour across the country to finally return me home to San Francisco after 7 months of bohemian life in Cincinnati. We’d each died our hair bright colors and set off to investigate the assassination locations of both JFK and MLK. This story isn’t about that. This part of the story happens later on when things had started to go a bit, but not completely sideways. 

After a grueling all night drive on lonely desert roads in Northern Arizona we found ourselves at the North Entrance of the Grand Canyon. We grumbled and paid the 20 dollar (!?!?) entrance fee since this was the Grand Canyon after all. It was truly majestic as promised but didn’t quite seem worth the drive the guide books said the North Rim was. No matter we basked in nature’s beauty but couldn’t afford to camp there so we pressed on see Frank in Vegas. 

When we were leaving St George UT we started to notice the brakes were making a bit of a grinding sound. This went from faint to extremely loud quite quickly and we decided to make our way from Southern Utah to Las Vegas as quick as we could to get the brakes looked at.

The path from where we were to Vegas was 1-15. On the atlas map it cuts through the upper corner of Arizona on into Nevada then right into Vegas. No biggie. Loads and loads of flat roads in the desert. We set off with Kit behind the wheel. I dozed a bit as we zipped through flat desert scrub back into the upper corner of Arizona. As we got closer to the border with Nevada the road started to incline down and a sign said “Entering the Virgin River Gorge.” Soon enough the walls of the gorge rose up around us and the freeway careened downhill though an amazing desert canyon landscape. 

I sat in the passenger seat agog. It seemed like the combination of weed, lack of sleep, and fear of death from complete brake failure enraptured me with the landscape. The way the freeway was delicately placed within the gorge awed me anew at the amazing thing our Interstate system truly is. I sat and stared all around me just drinking in the scenery and the landscape - truly a glorious moment to be alive. Kit did his best to bleed off speed as we careened down down down the gorge to the Great Basin valley floor. Once we were down at the bottom I wanted to beg Kit to turn around drive back up and do it again! But of course we couldn’t.

We eventually make it  to Vegas with no more steep hills or gorges to descend and pulled into the parking lot of Frank’s apartment complex with basically zero brakes left on the car. How we eventually got the breaks fixed and made it on to San Francisco is yet another tale.

I’ve been back up and down that stretch of I-15 a few times since. It’s never been quite as numinous and amazing as the first time (what is?) but it’s always stunning. One time I even stopped driving early in St George UT so I could be sure to drive that stretch of 1-15 in daylight hours the next day. It’s the stretch of freeway where I once touched heaven. 


What makes this notable and usual is that this portion of the Virgin River Gorge is certainly above average as freeway vistas go but it's nothing special at all compared to the gobsmacking splendor surrounding it. It's so run of the mill for the area that it was deemed suitable to ram a freeway down! All of Southern Utah and Northern Arizona is full of truly magnificent vistas: Glen Canyon, Zion, Arches, and of course the granddaddy of them all the Grand Canyon. Which I had just gazed upon with some wonder, but mostly indifference a few hours earlier in the day. Somehow the heady mix of exhaustion, THC, fear of brake failure, and sheer admiration of the engineering and chutzpa to put a freeway here made it burn in my mind as truly spectacular even unto this day.