Glendale

Glendale sits on US-89 in the upper East Fork of the Virgin River valley, north of Orderville. The town is small, rural, and one of the quieter places on the Zion-to-Bryce highway corridor. The valley narrows here as the road climbs toward Long Valley Junction and the Garfield County line, and the community’s working economy is small ranches and hay-and-cattle agriculture on the river bottoms.

A pioneer-era resettlement

The first Mormon settlers arrived in 1864 and were driven out by Black Hawk War-era conflict; the town was permanently resettled in 1871 by families pushing south from earlier Sevier and Garfield County settlements. The pioneer-era homes, the LDS chapel, and the school sit along the older grid through the heart of town. The Mountain View Smith Hotel — a 19th-century inn that has been operating intermittently — is one of the older surviving commercial buildings.

What the town is for

US-89 is the working spine; ranching is the historical and current backbone. The Long Valley Inn, a small motel, has run on the highway as a working stop. Glendale sits between Orderville and Hatch (the Garfield County town) on the back-road route between Zion and Bryce, and most outside traffic is either Bryce-bound or Best Friends-bound from the north. The town has held a small footprint without the post-2000 growth that has reshaped much of southwest Utah.