I'm up in Ogden and have looked at these markets.
When I underwrote it, the numbers didn't work well in St George. Also be careful there, in many of the areas you have to use the city's preferred property manager (you can't self manage), which is going to be 30% of your revenue and demolish any hope of returns, so double check that on the property you're looking at.
On the flipside, St George is an awesome place and people love going there, so if you have goals outside of cashflow like appreciation or personal use it could be good to get a hold of something there.
Mesquite is interesting, we've been looking there as well. People basically go there to play golf when it's too cold up here. Less competition there for sure. My main concern would be that it may end up being a bit of a covid market, where visitation was higher than usual the last couple years with people just looking for somewhere safe to drive to when they couldn't fly, which increased STR returns in the area temporarily and drove up prices a bit. So now that people can go back to Hawaii and Europe and all that jazz, is Mesquite going to be on their radar. So probably better returns in the short term, but the question is will the market really drop off there in the near future?