Jon Krakauer's book, Under the Banner of Heaven, mentions this place a lot. It's a VERY remote, tiny, near shanty town on the UT/AZ border, where polygamy, forced marriage, child rape and welfare fraud are alive and well. Anyway, I drove there the day before yesterday. The curiosity was just killing me, I was in the neighborhood and so I did it. This is how remote it is - 4 miles of unpaved, sand road to get there after about 11 miles through a very remote Pink Coral Sand State Park.
A few nights earlier, I got talking with a guy in a hotel bar in Vegas about it, as he mentioned he was a ski instructor in UT and had made some crack about polygamists. He had been to Colo. City and told me to expect a depressing place. He said the first thing you notice is all the unfinished houses, since they don't have to pay any real estate taxes until the house is finished. Sure enough, I saw maybe a handful of finished houses out of a few hundred. Most were missing siding.
Since it was Sunday when I was there, nothing at all was open and I only saw a handful of businesses anyway. No restaurants, cafes, convenient stores at all. I did see a few of the women in their 19 century-like long dresses running around and a few truckloads full of big families.
Google Warren Jeffs and see what else has been going on here. The birth defects from the inbreeding have been bad too. And since the state only recognizes one wife, the others are considered single moms and get welfare - all part of the fundamentalist LDS'ers plan to "bleed the beast", even though that local church has a nine figure bank account. I also heard stories about the town exiling teenage boys because there are not enough women to go around and the older men get first dibs. Really bizarre place and totally outside the reach (or political will) of any authority.