The Virgin River begins somewhere in the snowy high mountains of southern Utah, and cuts the spectacular canyon that became Zion National Park. It is the reason the booming city of St. George is located where it is.
Any river that runs year round through a desert is an amazing thing, A big one - the Nile - created Egypt. The much smaller Virgin cuts another amazing canyon south of the Utah plateau down into far northwestern Arizona, a canyon it shares with I-15 via some really amazing civil engineering.
The Virgin then exits AZ and enters Nevada where it wanders south and eventually empties into Lake Mead's northern Overton Arm. Tiny communities dot its banks, places like Beaver Dam, Overton and Bunkerville, also Hurricane, La Verkin and Springdale.
These were founded in many cases by hardy Mormon pioneers hoping to use its water to irrigate some bankside croplands. It was tough going in an unforgiving landscape of rock, sand, and scrub chaparral. Summers are hot enough to kill a person who can't find shade.
They took land nobody much wanted and with back-breaking effort made it support extended polygamous families whose many descendants are often still here, though most no longer farm and only a few are still polygamous.
