Hiking Southern Utah: Red Cliffs Mall
Trail name: Red Cliffs Mall
Location: 1770 E. Red Cliffs Dr., St. George, UT 84790
Distance: ½ mile, 1 mile roundtrip
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation gain: None
Permit required? No
Camping? Yes, but you will have to hide from the mall staff until after hours
Dog friendly? No
God friendly? Definitely not
Kid friendly? Yes, but also a great place to rid yourself of them once and for all
Directions: Enter “1770 East Red Cliffs Drive St. George, UT 84790” into your GPS, and just shut up and do whatever it says. If you are using Alexa and it begins to laugh at your request in a sinister way, hurl it against the wall and smash it to pieces.
Red Cliffs Mall is one of southern Utah’s most popular and heavily frequented hikes. Named after an ancient Navajo deity, Clifford — who legend has it was particularly bad at managing money — Red Cliffs Mall features a variety of local flora as well as unique opportunities to view neck tattoos, soccer moms and trophy wives strung out on opiates, and middle schoolers in their native habitats.
It is also one of few hikes, if not the only hike, in the area that offers a handicap-accessible entrance. Why all the others are so callous and insensitive to our less nimble citizens remains a mystery, but one can only presume that someone somewhere is an asshole.
There are multiple access points to the main trail, and two main trailheads exist. This guide will begin from the west entrance.
As you approach the west entrance to Red Cliffs Mall, you will immediately be struck by the lush plant life. Note that these varieties would not exist here without the vast wisdom of pioneer settlers whose sage guidance eventually led to their cultivation here, regardless of whether there is enough water to justify it.
The vegetation becomes no less spectacular upon entering the mall itself. In fact, any time one encounters any relatively deciduous-looking plant in southern Utah, it’s a bit of a shocker.
Proceed forward through the tunnel of irrelevant, dying commercial enterprises to reach a LensCrafters. If you have already lost a contact lens at this point, don’t go to LensCrafters, because they won’t help you find it — unless Stephanie is working, but after graduating from DSU last year and realizing that her degree is worthless, she is drinking herself to death these days, and I don’t imagine she’ll remain employed there for long as this rate.
Anyway, directly in front of LensCrafters is a map of Red Cliffs Mall. If you are already lost, you’re probably literally retarded and should just sit down and wail loudly in hopes that someone will take pity and escort you out of the mall. However, I tried this, and four hours of broadcasting ignominious, heart-breaking shrieks and sobs resulted in no assistance. So just call 911.
At the map, turn left and proceed until you reach a four-way intersection that reeks of pretzels. Turning left will lead you to JC Penny’s. It’s worth a look, if only because it’s just so alarming to find that JC Penny’s still exists, or if you forgot a tie.
Turning right will lead you to the source of that pretzel smell. Obviously, you are supposed to bring pretzels when you go for a hike. If you forgot to bring pretzels on this hike, like an idiot, here is where you can restock on pretzels.
Across from the pretzeleria is an ominous, nondescript door with no description, the lack of which only makes it that much more nondescript. No one knows what this door is. No one knows where it leads. I asked mall security about it, and he became shifty-eyed and ran away. I suspect that he was overwhelmed with terror, as was I. Do not open this door — and for Quetzalcoatl’s sake, do not push the button.
Return to the four-way intersection and proceed north on the main trail. To your left, you will see a GNC — another corporate dinosaur that is inexplicably not yet extinct. (At first, I thought it was a GMC, which was equally confusing.) To its right, you will see a long corridor that leads to a public restroom.
If you have already relieved yourself in one of the potted plants, you can ignore this corridor and simply proceed onward.
If you ate way too many pretzels, dash madly down this corridor before it’s too late.
You can refill your flasks, thermoses (thermi?), camelbacks, water bottles, and water balloons (water balli?) — in the event that you wisely brought prefilled water balloons just in case but had to drink them out of desperation — here. The water is a noxious, possibly flammable cocktail of H20 and various sanitizing compounds that tastes something like what you might imagine Borg urine tastes like, but it’s better than dying of dehydration. Probably. At least, presumably it is.
There is no family bathroom, nor is there a bathroom for genders such as abimegender, absorgender, adamasgender, adeptogender, aerogender (aka evaisgender), aesthetgender (aka videgender), aethergender, affectugender, agender, agenderfluid (aka cancegender), agenderflux (aka librafluid), alexigender, aliusgender, ambigender, amaregender, ambonec, amicagender, amogender (aka flirtgender), amorgender, androgyne, anesigender, angeligender, angenital, anogender, anongender, antegender, antigender, anxiegender, anvisgender (aka apagender, lethargender, inersgender, or anvisgender), apconsugender, apogender, apollogender, aporagender, aptugender — I’m not even through the genders that begin with the letter “A,” but my point is that unless you suffer from a stupid, boring, and utterly unremarkable gender like “male” or “female,” you have nowhere to relieve yourself besides one of the aforementioned potted plants.
(Now that I’m thinking about it, that aforementioned nondescript door may have led to the bathrooms for the hundreds and possibly thousands of other genders.)
Personally, I identify sexually as an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. There wasn’t a single helipad in sight. I might have used the women’s restroom, but as you can see it was under maintenance, and in my nigh-incontinent urinary distress from drinking so many water balloons I almost used the water fountain. So I used the men’s room. The plants were too far away at this point.
I must say that Red Cliffs Mall has superb toilets. When I flushed one, it created a vacuum so powerful that I was nearly sucked down into the plumbing. This is understandable as the white flour that is used to make mall pretzels is known to lead to the creation of anthracite bowel movements with a density similar to that of lead or iridium. Only toilets with the sucking power of a thousand Monica Lewinskys would be capable of evacuating that sort of material from a toilet bowl.
Remember, if you are faced with the daunting task of eliminating a pretzel-induced turd, relax. Don’t push too hard or you’ll bust something.
One of the worst thing about Utah’s public lands — I think we can all agree — is the conspicuous absence of mirrors. I can’t begin to tell you how many times my daughter and I have been out in the wilderness, desperately trying to enjoy the outdoors but completely flummoxed by the lack of mirrors. How is one supposed to remove kale from between one’s teeth in the desert?
Fortunately, the bathrooms at Red Cliffs Mall will not let you down. Here, you can wash your hands while looking at them in the mirror, which just makes washing your hands that much cooler. Or you can pee in the sink and watch yourself doing that, which just makes peeing that much cooler. Ever wonder what it looks like to others when you’re blackout drunk and urinating on one of those loathsome, meretricious buffalo statues? Now you can see for yourself! When you’re done, you can take a sexy picture of yourself and post it on social media to virtue signal to your friends about how cool the sink you just peed in was.
Once you are done playing in the bathrooms (I spent a solid 45 minutes making papier-mache hats out of toilet paper and hand soap), you can return to the trail and turn left.
You may have noticed several odd shrines in the middle of the trail throughout the hike. These are in fact not shrines but rather a way for parents who hate their children to slowly poison them with tasty garbage. With a coin offering, one can access several technically edible but otherwise toxic confections that can be fed to children or otherwise thrown at unsuspecting passers-by if one has run out of water balloons.
If you have just poisoned your child — or someone else’s child — you can lead him or her to this area. The idea appears to be that the child will be disoriented by the apparent vomiting of shapes, numbers, and letters, thereby rendering him or her — or aer, or cir, or cos, or henom, or jhem, or mair, or nym, or xim, etc. — easily left to mall security’s indefinite invigilation.
While your children, or at least someone’s children, stumble about in a daze, you can trot across the trail to a pizza restaurant (“restaurant”) that dishes up triangular gut bombs. Presumably, the ample grease is intended to facilitate the passing of what would otherwise be the cheesy equivalent, as far as your digestion is concerned, of swallowing an oleaginous diaphragm.
Here you will see another map of the mall. At this point, you will realize that this is the tiniest mall that has ever been built. It is like a little baby mall. Here, you can either proceed out the northeast exit, phone a friend to pick you up, or call 911 to escape this adorable but claustrating little mall.
If you’re looking for a great place to hike in southern Utah, don’t go to Angel’s Landing, because you’ll just fall and die like everyone else. Red Cliffs Mall has everything a hiker could ask for: exotic flora, Cretaceous-era retail outlets, pretzels, mirrors, air conditioning, soccer moms, world-class bathrooms, and a place to leave those 13 kids you were pressured into having for someone else to deal with once and for all.
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