Two capped hoodoos in silhouette against a twilight sky in the Grand Staircase country — the left one a broad flat slab of caprock balanced on a squat pedestal, the right one a heavier rounded cap on a thick fluted neck, each a column of soft rock left standing by the harder bed on top of it. The stone reads almost black at this hour and the colour is all in the sky, which runs from deep violet overhead through magenta to a hard orange band along the horizon, with thin cirrus drawn across it. Kanab itself, the Coral Pink dunes and the animal sanctuary are not in the frame.
BLMUtah / public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Utah · Region

Kanab & the Grand Staircase

The red-rock crossroads of southern Utah — the movie-history town of Kanab, the Coral Pink Sand Dunes, and the largest animal sanctuary in the country.

3 places to explore

Kanab takes its name from a Southern Paiute word for the willows that grew thick along the creek here — kanav, the willow canyon mouth. Southern Paiute families farmed corn, beans, and squash on that creek water and on the springs below the Vermilion Cliffs for centuries before anyone platted a townsite. South and west across the Arizona line, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians — Kai'vi'vits, the Mountain Lying Down people — holds a reservation of roughly 121,000 acres, set aside by executive order in 1913 and enlarged in 1917. It is a fraction of the country their ancestors used. When Mormon settlers arrived in the 1860s they built on the springs and the creeks, because in this landscape the water was the whole of the matter, and taking the water was how the land changed hands. Pipe Spring, the most contested of them, is now a national monument sitting entirely inside the reservation.

Kanab sits at the center of more red rock than almost anywhere on earth. Within a couple of hours lie Zion, Bryce, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and a wilderness of slot canyons and painted cliffs — which is why this small town has long been the crossroads of the region, and why Hollywood spent half a century filming Westerns in the sandstone all around it. Locals call it Little Hollywood.

The town is the gateway to the Grand Staircase — the immense geologic stairway whose colored cliffs climb step by step from the depths of the Grand Canyon up to the rim of Bryce. The most coveted hikes nearby, like the swirling sandstone of The Wave, are rationed by lottery, and the permits are drawn right in Kanab.

Two very different draws sit just outside town. Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park is a six-square-mile sea of salmon-colored sand, ground down from the surrounding Navajo sandstone and heaped into dunes you can sled or ride. And tucked into a red-walled canyon to the north, Best Friends Animal Sanctuary is the largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the country — home to some 1,600 animals at a time, open for tours and for anyone who wants to spend a day walking a dog through the desert.

Come for the canyons; stay for the pink sand, the old movie sets, and the dogs.

What to See in Kanab & the Grand Staircase

3 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

The dune field at Coral Pink Sand Dunes seen across its vegetated margin — bunchgrass, low shrubs and a yucca rooted in hollows of pale apricot sand, an out-of-focus branch sweeping across the lower right. Beyond them a smooth, wind-rippled dune ridge rises and falls through the middle distance, and a dark conifer-covered ridge stands along the skyline under a clear sky. No red cliffs are visible in the frame.

Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park

Kanab

Sweeping dunes of coral-colored sand framed by red cliffs

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Towns & Gateways

Kanab's Center Street — US-89 — on a winter afternoon, looking across wide, nearly empty pavement at the Parry Lodge sign: MOTEL in red on white, Parry in script on a red banner, LODGE in bulb-lit letters on blue, and a reader board offering HAPPY HOLIDAYS, ROOMS $59 TO 89, BREAKFAST INCL above VACANCY. Bare cottonwoods line the street, cars stand at the kerb, and a sign for the Kanab Heritage Museum fronts a brick building at right. A red sandstone butte rises behind the town in late light, a white letter K on its slope.

Kanab

Kanab

Little Hollywood — where hundreds of Western movies were filmed

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Attractions

The gate of Angels Rest, the pet cemetery at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary — twin iron arches lettered ANGELS REST in copper, cut-metal paw prints along the tops of the gates and bird silhouettes hung from the inner arch, and a cat and a dog cut in sheet metal filling the two leaves. Flagstone paving runs up between low walls of stacked red sandstone. Beyond the gate stand metal flowers on stems, a timber bench and gravel ground; a banded sandstone cliff with junipers on its ledges rises behind. None of the sanctuary's animal areas are in the frame.

Best Friends Animal Sanctuary

Kanab

The largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States

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Scenic Drives through Kanab & the Grand Staircase

Scenic Byway

US-89: Climbing the Grand Staircase

The climb from Lake Powell to Bryce Canyon — up the Grand Staircase, where each step north is younger rock and higher ground, from the slickrock desert to the Pink Cliffs and their hoodoos.

163 mi · 3.5 hrs

Stories from Kanab & the Grand Staircase

History

When Everyone Else Has Had a Turn

In 1911 the town of Kanab put five women on the ballot as a joke. They won, governed for two years, and the mayor signed every ordinance under a name that was not hers.

5 min read

Kanab & the Grand Staircase rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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