There is no shortage of outdoor adventure opportunities in the red rock country surrounding St. George. While many people come to the region to explore places like Zion National Park and Snow Canyon State Park, the St. George area is also home to a number of remarkable museums devoted to art, history and the natural world. Here are six of our favorite museums to explore in and around St. George.

Western Sky Aviation Warbirds Museum

4196 S. Airport Parkway

St. George

(435) 669-0655

American fighter pilots in the Korean War had quite the shock when they first encountered North Korean and Chinese MiG-15 jet fighters in combat. While the Americans flew straight-winged P-80 Shooting Stars, the Soviet-designed MiG-15s of their opponents had swept-back wings that gave them greater speed and maneuverability.

At the Western Sky Aviation Warbird Museum, visitors get an up-close look at a MiG-15 that was flown in the Korean War – and that still has the bullet holes to prove it. That’s just one of the military aircraft on display at the museum, located at the St. George Regional Airport.

The museum also has an A-37 Dragonfly, a ground support aircraft that saw service in Vietnam. In fact, the museum’s specimen was captured by the North Vietnamese, then recaptured by U.S. forces.
As far as the museum can tell, it is the only flyable A-37 in existence.

Retired U.S. Air Force Col. Jack Hunter, the museum’s founder and president, is particularly excited about a recent arrival to the collection: a four-engine C-54 Skymaster transport plane, built at the end of World War II. This type of plane was used in 1948-49 during the Berlin Airlift, when Allied forces dropped food and fuel to save the German city during a Soviet blockade. One of the C-54 pilots was Salt Lake City native Gail Halvorsen.

“He took a liking to the German kids, who didn’t have anything,” Hunter said. “He decided to drop candy out of the C-54 on parachutes for these kids.”

Halvorsen earned the nickname “the Candy Bomber.” By the end of the airlift, the candy operation dropped 23 tons of candy on 250,000 parachutes.

 

Rosenbruch World Wildlife Museum

1835 S. Convention Center Drive

St. George

(435) 656-0033

These days, there are hundreds of nature documentaries at our fingertips, but they can only communicate so much about the real-life experience of being around animals – texture, size, scale and detail are lost to the limitations of the screen. That’s where the Rosenbruch World Wildlife Museum fills a gap in our relationship with nature, offering guests the chance to get up close and personal with majestic creatures from across the globe.

Visitors to the museum marvel at more than 300 taxidermy animals staged in exhibits that mimic their natural habitats, appearing as though they might come alive at any moment. An accompanying audio presentation accessible by mobile phone offers more information on each exhibit, as well as stories told by museum founder Jim Rosenbruch. Kids love the hands-on Interactive Children’s Gallery, where they can feel fur, horns and pelts, and simulate the great outdoors in a camping play area.

Kimberly White, the museum’s gift shop specialist, is always delighted to give children’s tours, during which fun facts about animals often elicit enthusiastic reactions.

“Talking about the giraffe is my favorite, because they eat their own earwax,” White said. “You tell them they stick their tongue out and stick it in their ear and wiggle it around. The kids are all like, ‘Eewwwww!’ and you know they’re going to remember that and tell their families.”

The Rosenbruch describes itself as a library of nature, and its slogan, “We do not inherit the earth, we borrow it from our children,” is a testament to its commitment to both conservation and education.

 

Hurricane Pioneer Museum

35 State St.

Hurricane

(435) 635-3245

Joe Scow and Emily Wood had a multitiered wedding cake when they got married in Hurricane in 1907. They and their guests ate most of it, but the couple saved the top tier as a keepsake, putting it on the mantel – where it stayed for the next 83 years, until their granddaughter donated the desiccated cake to the Hurricane Pioneer Museum.

Remarkably, the cake isn’t the museum’s only ancient edible. Sometime in the mid-1940s, Hurricane resident Grace Wright Jepson put a slab of bacon in a sack to cure. Jepson died in 1958, and her family forgot all about the bacon. It wasn’t until 1996 that the family let the museum’s Executive Director Phyllis Lawson look around in the basement, where she found the bacon in its sack hanging on a nail. The family donated the bacon, which is now displayed in an exhibit.

Many people come to the museum for the cake and bacon, Lawson said, but they stay to hear the stories of the settlers who built Hurricane. The pioneers started by hand-digging the 7 ½-mile Hurricane Canal from the Virgin River to irrigate the parched land, a process that took more than a decade. By 1906, the canal was complete, and 11 founding families – among them Lawson’s grandmother – came to settle Hurricane.

The canal was the lifeblood of Hurricane for much of the 20th century, but by the late 1980s, it had become obsolete thanks to new pressurized water pipes. Today, portions of the dry canal around Hurricane have been converted into hiking trails. However, aerial photos at the museum show what the canal looked like when still in operation.

 

St. George Children’s Museum

86 S. Main St.

St. George

(435) 986-4000

A farm in the countryside, government offices that appear straight out of the U.S. Capitol building, a grocery store stocked with canned goods and the works – one would hardly believe so much of the world could fit in one building. With a motto like “discover, imagine, create,” guests of all ages know they can always expect a magical experience from the St. George Children’s Museum.

The museum stimulates all five senses, giving ample opportunity for hands-on exploration. Children flex creative muscles in the music and art rooms, learn about fossils and dinosaurs in the “prehistoric place,” and explore the depths of the sea in a model submarine. A rich variety of exhibits offers kids and their families the opportunity to immerse themselves in unstructured play – they’re limited only by the reaches of their own imaginations. The museum provides the canvas for fun and discovery, but it’s anything but blank, as each exhibit is beautifully designed to mimic both the real world and fantastical places.

Sonya Darter, museum’s executive director, says the emphasis on open-ended play is a big part of what makes the experience so impactful.

“When things are open-ended for children, they become much more engaged and develop their own imagination and approaches,” Darter said. “Even though it looks like a lot of fun and games, we are really teaching important life skills.”

The role of play is crucial in child development, she said. And by offering a vibrant and engaging place to play and meet friends, the museum creates a wonderful sense of community.

The museum opened in 2013, though its building dates back more than a century before that. Constructed of local red sandstone, the structure was completed in 1911 as the home of the Dixie Academy, the name of which still appears above the museum’s entrance.

 

St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm

2180 E. Riverside Drive

St. George 

(435) 574-3466

In 2000, Sheldon Johnson was leveling a hill on his property when he happened upon what the museum calls a “paleontological jackpot”: dinosaur footprints preserved in stone and, eventually, thousands more fossils. This St. George area is the oldest Jurassic dinosaur site in Utah, and paleontologist Jim Kirkland even claims it’s “the best basal Jurassic track site in western North America.”

The Johnson family wanted to share their massive discovery with the public, so with the combined effort of scientists, local government and the Dinosaur Ah!Torium Foundation, the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm opened its doors in 2005.

The dinosaur tracks were created 200 million years ago, when St. George was on the shoreline of ancient Lake Whitmore. This Jurassic ecosystem was home to a wide variety of dinosaurs, fish, crocodile-like reptiles and plant life. When the animals left their footprints on the muddy lake shore, the mud occasionally fossilized, leaving tracks so clear that sometimes the skin texture is readily apparent.

In addition to footprints and fossils, the museum has a 95-foot-long mural depicting the shores of Lake Whitmore in the early Jurassic, as well as five colorful life-size models of prehistoric animals. Video monitors throughout the building show short educational clips, and a timeline exhibit titled “Dawn of the Dinosaurs” puts other dinosaur sites around Washington County into chronological perspective.

 

St. George Art Museum

47 E. 200 North

St. George

(435) 627-4525

The St. George Art Museum is the home of the city’s permanent collection of more than 1,200 pieces of artwork. Of course, there’s not room to display them all simultaneously, so different selections are rotated in throughout the year.

In fact, the art on display in the museum’s three galleries is completely changed with each season, rewarding repeat visits to see what’s new. One gallery is always dedicated to pieces from the city’s permanent collection, while two galleries are reserved for traveling exhibits and showcases of individual artists’ work.

This winter, one gallery will feature landscape paintings by artist Gabriel Islas. In a larger gallery, the museum hosts its first Clay Invitational, which features sculpture and installation-based artwork from around a dozen regional artists. The exhibit is particularly near and dear to museum Manager Natalie Gula, who is herself a ceramic artist whose work will be among that on display. Her large sculptural vases incorporate some of the blue clay found near St. George. Blue clay creates problems for local home construction, but it adds a new dimension to her ceramic work and connects it to the region.

The museum has ways to get local artists involved beyond its three main galleries. The gift shop is almost a gallery itself, featuring functional artistic items from creators in the St. George area. Each month, the museum hosts an art critique night for aspiring artists to bring in their work for a group evaluation. Attendees vote on their favorite piece of the night, and the winning artist is invited to display the artwork at the museum for the month.

Among the museum’s special events, a perennial favorite is Light the Night, a holiday celebration held Dec. 9, featuring an open house, arts and crafts for sale, a live chamber choir, and hot chocolate and cider.