By Scott Buehler, Southern Utah localWalk the boomtown main street and go into the 1877 Wells Fargo building
1903 Wells Fargo Rd Museum admission Year round Directions
Just northwest of Leeds, up Silver Reef Road from exit 23, is a main street that had two thousand people on it in 1879 and has almost nobody on it now. The Silver Reef Museum occupies the 1877 Wells Fargo express office, a building that stood empty for decades before its restoration in the early 1980s, and it is the anchor of a walk through mill ruins, foundations and the jail, which is still standing.
The strange part is what has been built around it. Modern custom homes now stand among the actual ruins, which means the walk takes you past a nineteenth century foundation and then a driveway, repeatedly. The Silver Reef page takes the discovery, the mines, the fire, the bust and the parts of the community most accounts skip.
Check the schedule for living history and lectures
The museum is open Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 10 to 3, and holds occasional living history and lecture events through the year, which can turn a self guided walk round some foundations into something closer to a programme. Check the current schedule before you drive out. Either way the museum and the walk stand on their own, and the ruins do not keep hours.
The ruins are in a residential area now
This is the etiquette point and it matters more here than at most ghost towns. People live at Silver Reef, in expensive houses, on the same ground as the ruins. Park where the museum tells you to, stay on the marked walking routes, and do not wander into what looks like open ground between foundations, because a fair amount of it is somebody's garden.
The details
Getting there
Exit 23 off Interstate 15 and up Silver Reef Road. The museum is signed and has its own parking, and the walking route starts from it.
Before you go
- Check the museum's own hours and event schedule before driving up.
- The ruins sit among occupied homes. Stay on the marked routes.
- Summer here is genuine desert heat with no shade on the main street. Go early.
- The jail and the mill ruins are the two structures worth finding beyond the museum building.
- The Cosmopolitan Restaurant building is a 1992 rebuild, a restaurant until 2010 and now the museum's event hall, not an original.
Find the four stone buildings of the CCC camp on Mulberry Lane
96 W Mulberry Ln Free Year round, daylight Directions
Civilian Conservation Corps Company 585 opened a camp here in October 1933 and it was dedicated on 11 November that year. About two hundred young men from across the country lived in frame barracks, and when the camp closed in 1942 almost all of the timber came down. What did not come down are four small buildings the crews built out of local red orange sandstone in coursed rubble masonry, and they are still standing on about two and a third acres.
The Washington County Historical Society records this as the only CCC camp in Utah with buildings still standing, and the National Register nomination calls it perhaps the best remaining example in the state. The CCC camp page takes each of the four and what the crews built while they were here.
Four buildings, and each one had a job
The infirmary is the smallest at roughly 192 square feet. The dispensary and supply building runs about 480, the blacksmith shop about 360, and the commander's headquarters about 496. That is the administrative core of a camp of two hundred men, and the reason it survived is that it was built in stone while everything the men actually slept and ate in was frame.
What they built is still in use
This is not a monument to nothing. The crews from this camp built the road to Oak Grove, the campground at the top of it, and a swimming pool for the town. Ninety years later the road is still the way up the south face of Pine Valley Mountain and the campground is still where you park to walk it. Very few New Deal sites let you stand in the office and then drive the project.
The details
Getting there
Off Mulberry Lane inside the town. The site is managed by the Leeds Historical Society and the buildings sit just inside the monuments at the entrance.
Before you go
- It is an outdoor site rather than a staffed museum. Expect to read rather than to be shown round.
- The stone is red sandstone salvaged from the Silver Reef ruins.
- The camp is also recorded as F-14 and SCS-7, and as archaeological site 42WS2394, if you are chasing records.
- Pair it with Oak Grove Road, which the same crews built, for a much better day than either on its own.
- There is no water, no toilet and no shade on site.
Walk to Jurassic dinosaur tracks on the Silver Reef Trail
Red Cliffs Recreation Area Day use fee Best October to April Directions
The Bureau of Land Management's Red Cliffs Recreation Area sits minutes west of town through the interstate underpasses, and alongside the year round campground and the Red Reef waterfall hikes it carries something most visitors do not know is there: genuine Jurassic dinosaur trackways along the Silver Reef Trail. Not a cast, not an interpretive panel about tracks elsewhere. Tracks in the rock.
The whole recreation area sits inside the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve, which exists for the Mojave desert tortoise, and the rules that come with that are real and enforced: dogs on a leash everywhere, designated trails only in the lower zones, and rangers who write citations. That is the trade for red rock at the town boundary that will never be built on.
The height limit is the thing that ruins trips
Two Interstate 15 underpasses on the access road cap at eleven feet nine inches, and there is no way round them from this side. That is under a great many motorhomes and fifth wheels. Measure the rig rather than estimating it, because turning a large trailer round on that road is not a pleasant afternoon and somebody finds this out the hard way.
Seasons here run backwards from the mountain
This is low desert at around 3,000 feet, so the good months are the ones that are bad up on Pine Valley Mountain. October to April is the walking season, and July on the Red Reef trail is a genuinely poor idea. That inversion is one of the real advantages of a Leeds address: there is somewhere to walk in February and somewhere else to walk in July, and both are close.
The details
Getting there
A few miles south of Leeds, then west on the recreation area access road, through the two low underpasses beneath Interstate 15. The campground and the trailheads are signed from there.
Before you go
- Eleven feet nine inches at the underpasses. Measure before you set out.
- Dogs on a leash everywhere in the reserve, and designated trails only in the lower zones.
- Carry all your water. The campground has drinking water, but the trailheads do not.
- Flash flooding is a real monsoon hazard in these washes. Do not be in a narrow section under a building storm.
- The reserve is covered from Washington City's side on this site as well, and that page has the wider picture.
Drive Oak Grove Road up the south face of Pine Valley Mountain
Forest Rd 032 from the Leeds exit Free Late spring to autumn Directions
Eight and a half miles of steep, narrow forest road climb from the Leeds exit up beside Leeds Creek into old growth ponderosa, gaining a couple of thousand feet and finishing at a nine site campground at about 6,800 feet on the southern boundary of the Pine Valley Mountain Wilderness. It is the town's private back door to ten thousand foot country and it was cut by the CCC crews from the camp on Mulberry Lane.
From the campground, Oak Grove Trail 31030 climbs the steeper south face of the range to meet the Summit Trail near Signal Peak. That makes Leeds one of three towns with its own way onto this crest, and the only one on the south side. The Oak Grove page has the drive, the campground and the closure position.
It is not a road for a big vehicle
Steep and narrow are the Forest Service's own words, and the practical reading is tents, truck campers and small vehicles. Large RVs and travel trailers should not attempt it. The campground itself has nine tent sites, one vault toilet, no potable water and a pack it out rule, which tells you exactly what kind of arrangement it is.
One phone call decides whether this entry is on today
As of 2026 a Forest Service fire-danger order keeps Oak Grove Road closed to vehicles through January 1, 2027, and Leeds Creek has a camping restriction through 2031 to protect soil and water. The Forsyth Fire restoration closure is a separate order for the Pine Valley Recreation Area. Ring the Public Lands Information Center on 435-688-3200 before you leave the valley and ask specifically about the road, the campground and day use, because those three can have different answers on the same morning. The Oak Grove page sets out what is in force and why.
The details
Getting there
Northwest from the Leeds exit on Forest Road 032, following Leeds Creek. The road is unpaved, steep and narrow for most of its length.
Before you go
- Confirm the closure position first. Two separate orders may apply.
- Nine tent sites, one vault toilet, no potable water, and everything packs out.
- Not suitable for large RVs or travel trailers. The Forest Service says so plainly.
- Leeds Creek carries fishing where access is permitted, and the camping restriction does not automatically close the drainage to day use.
- The Public Lands Information Center in St. George, on 435-688-3200, is the number.
Look for the pioneer rock walls, and help map them if you can
Across the town and the valley · Free · Year round
Once somebody points them out you cannot stop seeing them. Dry stone walls run across this valley, built by the families who settled Leeds in 1867, probably marking old property lines and containing livestock, and there are a great many of them. They have never been systematically mapped, they sit on private ground, and they carry no legal protection whatsoever.
In 2026 that started to change. The Silver Reef Foundation, working with the Washington County Historical Society, a cartographer who spent more than forty years making maps for the federal government, and students from Utah Tech University, began a volunteer project to record them. The rock walls page covers the project and how to take part.
How to look at them without trespassing
The walls are on private property, so this is a roadside activity rather than a walking one. Drive or walk the public streets of the old townsite and the lanes off Main Street and read the lines in the landscape from where you are legally entitled to stand. That is genuinely enough: the pattern is visible from the road once you know to look for it, which is exactly why a mapping project is possible at all.
The reason there is any urgency
Leeds sits twenty minutes from a metro that is growing hard, on a freeway with two of its own exits. The mayor's line about it is the one worth carrying: history can be wiped out in just a few runs of a bulldozer. A wall with no designation, no survey record and no protection, on land somebody may sell, is exactly the sort of thing that disappears without anybody deciding to remove it.
The details
Getting there
The old townsite grid along the former US-91 alignment and the lanes running off it. Leeds Town Hall is where the mapping project has gathered volunteers.
Before you go
- Every wall you can see is on somebody's land. Look from the road and do not climb anything.
- The volunteer mapping project welcomes help; ask at Leeds Town Hall, where it has gathered volunteers.
- Low angle light in the morning and late afternoon makes the lines far easier to read.
- The Washington County Historical Society and the Silver Reef Foundation are the two organisations behind it.
- If you own land here with walls on it, the project wants to hear from you rather than about you.
Taste wine on ground the settlers planted for it in the 1870s
Zion Vineyards, edge of town Flat tasting fee, 21 and over Check hours Directions
Leeds grows wine again. Zion Vineyards runs a tasting room on the edge of town pouring its own bottles, and it is not a novelty transplant: this corridor had a working grape and wine trade in the 1870s, run by settlers under the church's Dixie wine mission, and the soil and the season that made that possible have not moved.
That gives an afternoon here a shape most small Utah towns cannot offer. A silver boomtown, a New Deal work camp and a vineyard, in a town of under nine hundred people, all within a few minutes of each other on the same old highway alignment.
The historical thread is genuine
The wine mission in this part of the territory was a real economic programme rather than a curiosity, and Toquerville, ten minutes northeast, carries the bulk of that story on this site. What Leeds has is the continuity: an operating vineyard on the same corridor, which turns a historical footnote into something you can taste. The Toquerville companion is where the Naegle winery and the mission itself are covered properly.
Ring ahead, as with everything else here
Tasting room hours in a town of eight hundred and sixty four people are not the hours of a Napa operation, and this whole list runs on the same advice. A phone call before a thirty five mile drive is the difference between an afternoon and a disappointment, and it is the single most useful habit for visiting any of the small towns on this corridor.
The details
Getting there
On the edge of town off the Main Street corridor. Confirm the current address and hours directly before setting out.
Before you go
- Ring ahead. Small tasting room hours move with the season and the staffing.
- Utah has its own rules about alcohol service and they apply here as everywhere else.
- Have a plan for the drive home, particularly given the freeway is the way back.
- The 1870s wine mission story belongs to Toquerville on this site and that page tells it properly.
- It pairs naturally with the Silver Reef walk, which is five minutes away.
Use the position: what Leeds hands to its neighbours
Five to forty minutes out · Varies · Year round
The honest last entry, because a great deal of what makes a Leeds address good belongs to somebody else. Quail Creek State Park is about ten minutes south past Harrisburg and Sand Hollow's warm water and dunes are a short run beyond it. Zion National Park is about 40 minutes east. St. George is 20 minutes south, Hurricane 20 southeast and Cedar City about half an hour north.
Every one of those is covered properly on this site from the town that actually owns it, and none of them is described here. What Leeds contributes is the geometry: two freeway exits of its own on the old highway between them, so you reach all of it without ever living next to an interchange.
Who owns what, and where to read it
Sand Hollow and Quail Creek belong to the Hurricane companion, which has the water, the dunes and the seasons. Zion is split five ways on this site by approach, and Springdale, Virgin, Rockville and La Verkin each carry their own. The Red Cliffs reserve is covered from Washington City as well as from here. Reading the town that owns a place beats reading the town next to it, every time.
The drive times are the actual amenity
Ten minutes to a reservoir, fifteen to a second town with services, twenty to a regional hospital and an airport, and forty to a national park is an unusual spread for a town of under nine hundred people. It is also why Leeds does not need to claim any of it. The case for the address is the position, not the ownership, and pretending otherwise would make this a worse page.
The details
Getting there
Interstate 15 south for the reservoirs, Washington City and St. George; SR-9 east from the Hurricane side for Zion; I-15 north for Cedar City.
Before you go
- State park entrance fees apply at Quail Creek and Sand Hollow.
- Zion's fee structure changed in 2026 for visitors who are not United States residents. Check before you price a park day.
- Traffic on SR-9 in the Zion direction is heaviest mid morning through the spring and autumn.
- Each of these is written up properly on the companion for its own town. Start there.
- There is no fuel in Leeds itself. Fill up in Hurricane, Washington City or at the freeway services.
The trick of this address
Two landscapes with opposite seasons, ten minutes apart
Leeds sits at about 3,500 feet with low desert on one side and a ten thousand foot range on the other. That is the argument for the town in one table, and it is why the walking season here never really closes.
| Red Cliffs, south then west | Oak Grove, northwest | |
|---|---|---|
| Elevation | Around 3,000 feet | About 6,800 feet at the campground |
| Drive | Under 10 minutes, paved to the underpasses | 8.5 miles of steep unpaved forest road |
| Best months | October to April | Late spring to autumn |
| What is there | Red Reef trails, dinosaur trackways, a campground | Old growth ponderosa, nine tent sites, a wilderness boundary |
| The catch | Eleven feet nine inches at the underpasses | Not for large vehicles, and closures apply |
| Rules | Tortoise reserve: leads and designated trails | Fire-danger road closure through January 2027; camping limits on Leeds Creek |
Neither is a substitute for the other and that is the point. When the desert is unusable the mountain is open, and when the mountain is under snow the desert trails are at their best.
Before you go
Three numbers and one tape measure
Most of what goes wrong on a Leeds day is arriving at something closed, or arriving at the Red Cliffs underpass in a vehicle that will not fit under it.
Ring ahead
- The Silver Reef Museum, for hours and the event schedule
- The Public Lands Information Center on 435-688-3200, for Oak Grove Road and the Leeds Creek orders
- The tasting room, because small hours move
- The Town of Leeds, if the question is about the CCC site or the historical society
Check before you drive
- The height of your vehicle against eleven feet nine inches
- The monsoon forecast between July and September, because these washes run
- Whether Oak Grove Road is inside a current closure order
- Red Cliffs day use fees and the reserve's leash and trail rules
- Summer temperatures, which at 3,000 feet make a midday desert walk a poor plan
Show up and it is fine
- The four CCC stone buildings, which keep no hours
- The Silver Reef ruins walk, which is free and open
- The rock walls, from the public road, in low light
- The old townsite grid along the former highway alignment
The washes here still run. Leeds was founded in 1867 by families who moved up from Harrisburg, where farmland and water were short, and the town has lived with its drainages ever since. Monsoon storms build over Pine Valley Mountain in July and August and send water down the washes fast. Do not walk a narrow section under a building storm, do not park a vehicle in a wash at any time in that season, and treat a flood zone check as ordinary due diligence on any parcel near one.
What this list leaves out, and why
- Sand Hollow and Quail Creek. Ten to twenty five minutes south and genuinely excellent, and both belong to the Hurricane companion on this site, which covers the water, the dunes and the seasons properly.
- Zion National Park. About forty minutes east, split five ways on this site by approach, and a Leeds list that led with it would be a list about somewhere else.
- Toquerville Falls and the wine mission. Ten minutes northeast and both squarely Toquerville's, including the Naegle winery and the mission that put grapes on this corridor in the first place.
- The Pine Valley village, the chapel and the Whipple Trail. That is the north side of the same mountain, reached from Central rather than from here, and it has its own companion.
- A restaurant guide. Leeds has two small places on Main Street, a Mexican restaurant and a pizza shop; for more choice, Washington is about 15 minutes south.
- Harrisburg's park model communities. They are a housing subject rather than a visitor one, and the mover page handles them, including the owned lot versus leased land question that decides the price.