Times are good again in this long-depressed town almost killed a generation ago by the collapse of the uranium industry.
Wedged between two increasingly famous national parks atop the Colorado Plateau, Moab's one-note tourist economy is flourishing today as it feeds off record numbers of vacationers.Local retail trade has more than doubled since 1990, according to statistics from the state Tax Commission, which logs quarterly trade reports for every town of any size in Utah.
Five years ago, Moab did $43 million in retail sales; in 1995 it topped $90 million.
You can't say it's because of any census surge. The population of all of Grand County is only 7,800, and though it has grown by 18 percent this decade the in crease is modest by Utah standards in the 1990s.
Tourism alone appears to have created this hotbed of new business, which is shared by longtime residents as well as newcomers recently relocated to the desert community.
"We were a sleepy town five years ago," said Kathy Holyoak, a lifelong inhabitant of Moab and proprietress of Balsley Heritage, a gift shop that opened just off Main Street last year.
As things changed in the '90s, Holyoak and her family did what many locals did: They seized the day, taking a house formerly used for storage and turning it into a going concern. Sporting the usual arts and crafts, its novel draw is an offbeat line of goods from the Dead Aspen Society, featuring the products of a local woodworker.
Around the corner on Moab's main drag, urban refugee Janet Alvillar said she gave up city living in February and moved south from the ever-congested Salt Lake area to work for herself in Moab.
"I just wanted to get out of that valley," said Alvillar, who now owns and operates La Sal Ice Cream, which successfully melds caffeine-free Mormon aesthetics with Moab's growing coffee-drinking public. At Alvillar's you can have the best of both worlds: a scoop of chocolate on a waffle cone and/or a cinnamon cappucino.
A few doors down, Nina Christopher embodies yet another breed of new entrepreneur: Those who came to Moab some time back to worship the sun and the sand and are now settling in for their own piece of the action.
"Last summer it really boomed as far as restaurants and motels," said Christopher, a former Coloradan who has live in Moab for three years and in late March opened "Legendary Leather" in a high-profile locale, hoping to turn a dollar off the thousands of European travelers who come through town in the summertime.
"They like this kind of thing," said Christopher.
"It's kind of a boom thing that's happening," said Doug Macdonald, the Tax Commission's chief economist, though he said by no means is Moab the only Utah municipality to have seen such retail growth.
A dozen or more towns around the states have seen their retail economies grow by 15 percent-plus since 1990, though Moab's is the only one that appears solely driven by tourism. (Statewide, Utah's retail economy has expanded by 10 percent annually this decade and projections are for it to grow another 12 percent in 1996).
Moab, home to most of Grand County's residents, is at the gateway to Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, both of which routinely set new attendance records and between them for the first time will attract 1.5 million visitors this year, according to projections by the National Park Service.
And while commerce is brisk, tax reports show a more-or-less constant number of businesses in recent years. In 1993, the town had 46 lodging establishments; at the end of 1995 it had 43. The local restaurant count has remained steady at 32. And the number of gas stations/auto-repair shops has actually fallen dramatically, from 31 during the last quarter of 1993 to 18 two years later.
"I think what may be happening is some of the big fish are coming in and eating the little fish," said Macdonald, offering an opinion echoed by Christopher, the leather merchant.
"There's a Rodeway Inn now . . . a Wendy's, an Arby's, a Dairy Queen, a Denny's," she said, adding that the arrival of corporate America only increases her confidence in the local economy.
"They're the ones who know," she said. "They're the ones who do the (market) studies."