Castle Country’s History and Culture

For years Castle Country (Carbon and Emery Counties in Utah) has been considered one of the “undiscovered” natural wonders of the American West.

A part of the Colorado Plateau, Castle Country is high desert country, located in Eastern Utah. In some sections, it is a sweeping country with towering mesas, buttes, and pinnacles rising from flat desert floors. In other areas, it boasts rolling pasturelands populated with antelope and wild horses. And just around the bend it can become an incredibly wild, broken land with streams cutting through slot canyons that open up to panoramic vistas.

Occupation of the San Rafael region dates back thousands of years to include people of the Desert Archaic Culture who were followed by those of the Fremont culture who inhabited present-day Emery County from about A.D. 500 to about A.D. 1300. Evidence of these people can still be found in numerous pictograph and petroglyph panels, such as those in Temple Mountain Wash, Muddy Creek, Ferron Box, Black Dragon Canyon, and Buckhorn Wash-all sites listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Ute Indians also occupied sites in Castle Valley.

Both counties have traditionally been steeped in energy production. Carbon County has been the state’s largest coal producing county and is the second largest natural gas producer in Utah, with 94 billion cubic feet produced in 2008. Emery County is the state’s No. 2 coal-producing county.

Sophisticated machine shops, pneumatic & hydraulic specialists, heavy equipment repair, skilled welders and machinist, electronic control experts along with computer technicians have found a niche in Castle Valley.

A strong professional support network is available through local accounts, insurance agents, attorneys, realtors, and office suppliers.

An area-wide network of fiber optics, digital switching and micro-wave linkages can accommodate todays and tomorrow’s technologies and volumes of traffic with high-speed, error-free transmission.

Interstates 70 and 15 bisect or border the two-county region while U.S. Highway 6 provides a major transportation artery between Salt Lake City and Denver markets.

There is a time to work and a time to play, and not better place to play than Castle County. Outdoor fun is limited to your by your imagination. Castle Country is home to the San Rafael Swell, Nine Mile Canyon, Goblin Valley, Scofield, Huntington, and Millsite State Parks, and the Manti LaSal National Forest. You can hike, bike, ATV, 4-wheel, camp, fish, and hunt in our mountains and deserts. You’ll also find dinosaur sites, museums, ancient Native American rock art, railroad and mining history, ghost towns, winter activities and year round events at our state of the art facilities, and events and activities. There are numerous roads that only four-wheel drive vehicles can negotiate. Spring and fall are ideal seasons to explore this country because temperatures are usually moderate. Summer days can be uncomfortably hot. Winter nights get very cold but winter days are often mild – very pleasant for hiking, biking and off-roading.