Hurricane sits on a sandstone bench above the Virgin River fifteen miles east of St. George, directly under the geologic uplift called the Hurricane Cliffs. The town is locally pronounced "HUR-ih-kun" — three syllables, stress on the first — which is the first thing every newcomer learns. Until about 2010, Hurricane was an orchards-and-alfalfa town with a one-stoplight downtown. It is no longer that.
A canal made the town
Hurricane Bench was uninhabitable for permanent farming until water could be lifted from the Virgin River up onto it. The Hurricane Canal Company organized in 1893; the canal — eight miles of hand-cut ditch with rock-blasted sections through the cliff face — took eleven years to finish. Water reached the bench in 1904, and the town was platted that fall. Peach orchards and alfalfa fields grew on the new ground; Hurricane Peach Days, the September festival, is the unbroken cultural artifact of that founding crop. The canal itself is preserved as a National Register historic district and is hiked as a route along the cliff face.
The post-2010 build-out
Sand Hollow Reservoir was completed in 2002; Sand Hollow State Park opened in 2003 with its red-water reservoir and the dune system at Sand Mountain. By the 2010s the OHV and side-by-side rental industry had concentrated more vehicles in Hurricane than any other Utah town — at peak season the rental fleet running out of the Sand Hollow corridor numbers in the thousands. The Coral Canyon golf community, Sky Mountain Golf Course, the Hurricane Cliffs mountain bike system (JEM, Goulds, Hurricane Rim), and Over the Edge Sports — the bike shop that built much of the trail network — turned the town from agricultural backwater into Washington County's recreation capital. The orchards still exist, but most of the old peach ground is now subdivision.
Where the recreation traffic concentrates
Three state parks ring the town. Sand Hollow is the OHV and red-water reservoir; Quail Creek (turquoise, deeper, cooler) is the trout fishery and water-skiing reservoir three miles north; Gunlock and Snow Canyon are a short drive west. The Hurricane Cliffs system runs south of town along the cliff face and is one of the most-trafficked mountain bike networks in the western U.S., with Over the Edge as the de facto trailhead-services anchor. The Virgin River runs through the bench at La Verkin Overlook, where the river drops several hundred feet through the gorge that separates Hurricane from La Verkin.
A town that absorbed a county's growth
Hurricane has roughly tripled in population since 2000 and is now the second-largest city in Washington County. Most of the new construction sits on what was orchard ground above the canal, with newer subdivisions stepping out toward Sky Mountain, Coral Canyon, and the Sand Hollow corridor. The town still runs Peach Days each September with a parade and pageant — one of three orchard-festival towns in the 435, alongside Santa Clara's Swiss Days and Washington City's Cotton Days. It is the only town in the county where a 1904 hand-dug canal and a thousand-vehicle ATV rental fleet are part of the same local economy.