Panguitch, Big Fish and the Quilt Walk
Near Panguitch, Utah
The old brick town of Panguitch guards the northern approach to Bryce Canyon, and its name comes straight from the Southern Paiute. Panguitch means big fish, a nod to the fat trout that once crowded the lake and streams nearby and fed both the Paiute and the settlers who followed. Mormon pioneers founded the town in March of eighteen sixty four, but the high country nearly beat them.
Crop failures and brutal winters brought the settlers to the edge of starvation, and the outbreak of the Black Hawk War later forced them to abandon Panguitch for a time before others returned to build it for good. Out of that first desperate winter comes the legend the town still celebrates, the Quilt Walk. As the story goes, a group of men set out over the snowbound mountains to fetch flour from Parowan to keep the settlement alive.
The snow was too deep and soft to cross, until one man laid his quilt on the surface and found it held his weight. So the men leapfrogged their quilts across the mountain, laying one down, stepping across, then carrying it forward, all the way to the grain and back. Every June, Panguitch remembers that walk with a festival, quilts and all.
