The 10 best things to do in Mount Pleasant

It is unusual for a town of about 4,020 to hold a boarding school that draws students from around the world, and that is exactly what Wasatch Academy is. A Presbyterian minister, Duncan McMillan, founded it in 1875, a year before Utah statehood was even close, and it has run without a break ever since, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating schools in the state and Utah's only college preparatory boarding school. The 35 acre campus sits a block west of Main Street, a mix of old brick halls and newer arts and athletics buildings.

You do not enroll to appreciate it. The grounds are open to a respectful walk, the architecture reads like a small New England college dropped into central Utah, and the school runs a full arts and athletics calendar, roughly twenty arts and music programs and two dozen teams, with events through the year. If you are weighing a move and want to actually see the place, the admissions office arranges campus visits. The deeper story, the founding, the campus and what an international prep school means for a small Sanpete town, is on the sibling Wasatch Academy page.

Mount Pleasant's history is stacked in one place at the Pioneer Museum and Relic Home at 150 South State Street, run by the local Daughters of Utah Pioneers. Inside are the portraits, tools, quilts and records of the families who settled the town, first in 1852, then again in 1859 after an early abandonment. It reads as a small, honest county museum, the kind where the volunteer at the desk knows the story behind each case.

The reason it earns a place on this list is the event it marks. In 1872, Mount Pleasant was the site of the final peace treaty that ended the Black Hawk War in central Utah, the long conflict between Latter-day Saint settlers and the Ute and allied bands over land and water. A historical marker downtown records the signing, and the museum keeps the fuller record of the era. This page frames it simply as the treaty that closed the chapter; the sibling historic Main Street and the Black Hawk War page tells the settlement history around it in full.

Every Sanpete town has a canyon at its back, and Mount Pleasant's is Pleasant Creek Canyon, which opens at the east edge of the city where the pavement gives way to the forest road. The creek that names the town runs out of it, and a canyon road climbs from the mouth up onto the Wasatch Plateau. Near the bottom it is an easy stop for a picnic, a walk along the water or a look at the fall color; higher up it becomes a serious mountain drive.

Keep going and the canyon road ties into Skyline Drive along the crest of the plateau and into the Arapeen OHV trail system, so on a summer afternoon you will share it with side by side machines and horse trailers as often as cars. The high lakes and streams up top hold trout, and it doubles as hunting country in the fall. It is a summer and fall route only; snow closes the upper canyon. The plateau itself is covered on the region Skyline Drive page, and the canyon in full on the sibling Pleasant Creek Canyon page. This entry is the doorstep drive.

The city aquatic center is the everyday amenity that keeps a Mount Pleasant winter from being all indoors and no motion. It is an indoor pool with a water slide, a diving board and lap swimming, run by the city at 74 East Main, a block east of City Hall, and in the warm months a splash pad runs outdoor fountains and jets. For a small central Utah town it is a real facility, open year round, and it is the reliable rainy day or cold day answer when the canyon is snowed in.

This is the one purely local, purely practical stop on the list, and it earns its place precisely because it is open every month of the year. Hours and admission are set by the city and change with the season and the school schedule, so the city recreation page is the place to confirm before you drive over. If you are traveling with children, this and the town parks are the easiest way to burn an afternoon.

Ten minutes north on US-89, in the neighboring town of Fairview, is the first of the near here picks and the most surprising. The Fairview Museum of History and Art is a small volunteer museum with a serious claim to fame: a full mammoth on display: a Columbian mammoth found in 1988 at Huntington Reservoir, about 18 miles east of Fairview, estimated to be about 15,000 years old.

The rest of the museum is the art and history of Sanpete County, pioneer relics in one wing and a gallery of regional painting and sculpture in another, which is a lot of range for a rural museum. It is a donation to enter and an easy add to a Mount Pleasant day, especially in weather that rules out the canyon. Because it is staffed by volunteers, hours can be seasonal, so a call ahead is wise.

Five miles south of Mount Pleasant is Spring City, which is unusual enough to be worth the short drive on its own. The entire town is a National Register historic district, listed in 1980, one of the few places in the country where the register lines and the city limits are the same. What that means on the ground is block after block of nineteenth century homes and barns built from local oolitic limestone, a pioneer village that never got paved over, and it has quietly become a home for artists drawn to that intact fabric.

You visit Spring City by driving and walking its grid slowly, reading the dates on the houses. There is no gate and no ticket; the town itself is the attraction, at its best on the annual heritage day when the old homes open. Spring City is its own subject on the region Sanpete Heritage Highway page rather than a stop this Mount Pleasant list tries to retell, so treat this as the pointer to it.

Skyline Drive is the high dirt road that runs the crest of the Wasatch Plateau, the long wall of mountains east of the Sanpete Valley, near and above ten thousand feet for much of its length. Pleasant Creek Canyon at number four is one of the ways up to it from Mount Pleasant, and from the top the payoff is a summer of alpine meadows, wildflowers, high lakes and a view that drops off both sides of Utah at once. It is genuinely remote country, shared by cattle, ATVs and hunters.

It is emphatically a summer and fall road; snow closes it for more than half the year, and even in season it is high, exposed and short on services, so it is a plan rather than a spur of the moment drive. Because every Sanpete canyon climbs to the same plateau, the full survey, the access points, the reservoirs and the season, lives once on the region Skyline Drive page. From Mount Pleasant, the door to it is Pleasant Creek Canyon.

About twenty minutes south down US-89 is Ephraim, the college town of the valley, home to Snow College and its campus, arts and student energy. It is the other institutional anchor of upper Sanpete alongside Wasatch Academy, and between them the valley has more of a school pulse than its size would suggest. Ephraim also carries the strongest Scandinavian heritage in the county, from the Danish founders, and it hosts the Scandinavian Festival on Memorial Day weekend.

For a Mount Pleasant visitor, Ephraim is the easy half day trip: the historic co-op and square, the college campus, and a Main Street with more places to eat than the smaller towns. It is a full town with its own story rather than a single stop, so this list points you to it and lets the Ephraim guide carry the detail. The practical side, homes, schools and the lay of the town, is on the Ephraim city guide.

Roughly half an hour south, about twenty two miles down US-89, is Manti, home of the county offices and the town with the landmark you can see from anywhere in the valley: the Manti Temple, completed in 1888, standing on its hill above the town. Whatever your own beliefs, the building is a genuine piece of nineteenth century Utah architecture, and the grounds around it are open to a respectful look, with a view back across the whole Sanpete Valley from the hill.

Manti also has its own historic Main Street, a courthouse and a long roster of pioneer era buildings, so it rewards a slow drive the way Mount Pleasant and Spring City do. It is the far end of the near here list from Mount Pleasant, and a full town in its own right, so this entry points you south and hands the detail to the Manti city guide.