Best Friends Animal Sanctuary offers critters amongst beautiful scenery

Tucked away in a gorgeous part of Southern Utah's Color Country, Best Friends Animal Sanctuary offers visitors excursions to several of its care centers for a resident population of never less than 1,700 domestic and wild creatures. In 2009, the largest no-kill homeless animal facility in the country celebrates its 25th year of pioneering animal rescue efforts and innovative and humane solutions to problems of pet over-population and animal abuse.

The sanctuary lies about 200 miles from Las Vegas near Kanab, Utah. To reach it, drive north on Interstate 15 into Utah. Continue through St. George to exit onto Highway 9 toward Hurricane. In Hurricane, turn on Highway 59, which becomes Arizona Highway 389. Drive east to Fredonia, Ariz., where you turn north toward Kanab. From Kanab, take U.S. 89 north about five miles to the Angel Canyon turnoff. A paved road takes you along a scenic route to the Best Friends welcome center.

If the scenery seems familiar, you likely have seen it before in movies, TV shows, and TV and print advertisements. The canyon and many other locations with dramatic scenery around Kanab have provided backgrounds for hundreds of movies over the past 80 years. Acquiring a former "movie ranch" in Angel Canyon and 33,000 adjacent acres in 1980, the sanctuary moved operations from its original location in Arizona. Best Friends has become known nationwide through media coverage of its national and international rescue operations and programs such as "Dogtown" on the National Geographic Channel.

The nonprofit facility houses and cares for abandoned, unwanted, abused, sick, impaired and elderly creatures. The sanctuary provides these hapless victims with a safe, caring environment manned by a core of veterinarians and staff, assisted by hundreds of volunteers. Of the animals that can be saved and rehabilitated, the sanctuary places at least 75 percent in homes. The others live out their lives on the property.

Best Friends accepts donations to fund its multi-million dollar annual budget. It also makes money from the sale of tax-deductible merchandise in its gift shop at the sanctuary's welcome center, in its member newsletter and magazine and online at www.bestfriends.org. It partners with communities and organizations to further its goals of no homeless pets, no-kill animal shelters and other humane solutions to animal concerns.

More than 25,000 people annually tour Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, open daily except Christmas Day from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Mountain time. The welcome center offers an orientation presentation and serves as the hub of trails to nearby pastures and ponds. Visitors see some of the horses, burros, pigs, geese, ducks, chickens and other barnyard denizens finding life is good in the open air at Best Friends.

Four times daily, guides load air-conditioned vans with visitors wishing to see more of the huge sanctuary on free hour-long tours. To ensure a place on one of these popular excursions, book in advance by calling (435) 644-2001, Ext. 0, by e-mail or by mail at 1501 Angel Canyon Road, Kanab, Utah, 84741.

The vans head up the canyon past former movie locations, including one barn built as a set, now a haven for several horses. Before climbing to a bluff above the canyon, the road skirts a memorial cemetery with hundreds of small wind chimes. The tour stops at several of the many individual facilities scattered among the pinions and junipers. Each is designed specifically for the housing and care of dogs, cats, rabbits, reptiles or birds. Wild creatures benefit from treatment and care at the sanctuary's licensed wildlife rehabilitation center.

The sanctuary offers visitors who want to stay a while use of a limited number of RV sites and a couple of rustic cottages on the property for nominal fees, discounted to member donors. These secluded facilities include drop-dead gorgeous views over Angel Canyon and Kanab Creek and all the fresh air you can breathe. Inquire about prices and reservations at the above phone number or online.

Margo Bartlett Pesek's columns appears on Sundays.