How Kanab earned the score

Let’s meet Kanab, Utah

Kanab sits in the far southern reach of Utah, a few miles above the Arizona line, at about 4,970 feet on a bench of red Navajo sandstone where Kanab Creek cuts down toward the Colorado. On paper it is small. The 2020 Census counted 4,683 residents inside 14.6 square miles, and the town is the county seat of Kane County, one of the least crowded corners of the Lower 48. What Kanab has instead of size is position, and it has spent a century learning to sell that position two very different ways. First it rented its scenery to Hollywood. Then it rented its location to everyone driving between the great parks of the Colorado Plateau. Both trades still run today, and together they carry a town that would otherwise be a quiet ranching stop into a Visitor Impact Score of 93, the Destination Leader band.

The setting does most of the talking. Drive in on US 89 and the cliffs turn the color of rust and salmon and, near the state park to the northwest, an improbable coral pink. Kanab is not the attraction the way a canyon rim is the attraction. It is the town you sleep in, eat in, and buy your permit in before the attraction. That is a humbler role, and it is also a durable one, because the parks that surround Kanab are not going anywhere and the town is the closest full-service basecamp to several of them at once.

How Kanab found its thing

The film chapter opened almost by accident. In 1924 the cowboy star Tom Mix brought a crew to Kanab to shoot The Deadwood Coach, riding his horse Tony through the sandstone that framed the town. The scenery read as the platonic American West on film, and word traveled back to California. The director William Wellman is credited with pinning the nickname that stuck. He called the place Little Hollywood, and it kept the name.

What turned a single shoot into an industry was a local family that decided to make hosting film crews their business. In the summer of 1931 the Parry brothers, Whit, Chauncy, and Gronway, who already guided tourists to Zion and the region’s scenic wonders, opened Parry Lodge in Kanab. They courted studios directly, offered beds and local know-how, and gave production a reason to keep coming back to a town in the middle of nowhere. Over the following decades the lodge housed crews for more than a hundred films. Its rooms, 89 of them, are still named for the stars who slept in them, a roster that runs from John Wayne and Gregory Peck to Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Maureen O’Hara, Clint Eastwood, and Ronald Reagan.

The output was remarkable for a place this small. Kanab and the surrounding county have backdropped well over a hundred movies and television shows since that 1924 debut. The list is a syllabus of the genre. Stagecoach country and the raw canyon of the classic Western gave way, in the 1940s and into the television era, to shoots for The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel, and Wagon Train. John Wayne made pictures here. So did the crews behind El Dorado in 1966 and The Outlaw Josey Wales in 1976. When the story needed a landscape that was not quite Earth, the dunes and desert around Kanab stood in for it. Planet of the Apes filmed here in 1968, and decades later the sci-fi Western series Westworld and Disney’s John Carter returned to the same otherworldly ground.

Through the boom years the population barely moved, hovering around 2,500 from the 1930s into the 1960s while film payrolls were among the town’s largest. That is the tell of a place living off a single anchor. When tastes shifted in the 1970s, foreign locations grew cheaper, and some locals tired of the disruption, the productions thinned. A town that had built its identity on being a film set had to find the next thing. It was standing on it the whole time.

How Kanab built the second act

The second act is geography, packaged. Kanab sits near the center of what regional tourism markets call the Grand Circle, and almost nowhere else can claim this many marquee landscapes within a short drive. Zion National Park is roughly 40 miles west. Bryce Canyon is about 70 miles north. The North Rim of the Grand Canyon is around 80 miles south. Lake Powell and Glen Canyon are about 60 miles east. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument begins at the town’s doorstep, and Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park is a short run northwest. The tourism campaigns lean into the obvious pitch. They call Kanab Base Camp, and the word does the work of an identity.

Basecamp is a strategy, not just a slogan, and Kanab has made two specific moves that turn passing traffic into overnight stays. The first is a genuine, once-in-a-lifetime draw that the town happens to control the door to. Coyote Buttes North, the sandstone formation known simply as The Wave, lies across the Arizona line in the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, and the Bureau of Land Management caps visitation at 64 people per day to protect the fragile rock. Demand is staggering. Roughly 200,000 people apply each year for those spots, split between an advanced lottery that awards 48 places four months out and a daily lottery that releases 16 more. Average odds of drawing a permit run in the single digits, on the order of 4 to 8 percent, and in peak months the daily lottery can see hundreds of hopefuls chasing sixteen slots. Kanab is where winners collect the permit, and where most of them stay the night before and after. A hike almost no one can get becomes a reason a great many people book a room.

The second move is a neighbor that pulls its own crowd. In 1984 Best Friends Animal Society established its sanctuary in Angel Canyon just outside town. It has grown into the largest no-kill sanctuary for companion animals in the country, spread across nearly 5,800 acres of red rock and home on any given day to as many as 1,600 dogs, cats, horses, birds, rabbits, and other animals. It is not a theme park bolted onto the desert. It is a working rescue operation that welcomes visitors, and it draws about 30,000 of them a year on guided tours, many of whom plan a trip around volunteering for a morning and then staying to hike. For a town of under 5,000, a steady stream of animal-loving travelers is a second anchor entirely independent of the parks.

What the two trades built, by the numbers

Put the pieces together and the ledger is clear. Tourism is not a side business in Kane County. It is roughly half of the local economy. Across 2019 to 2023, direct visitor spending in the county averaged a little over $175 million a year, and in 2023 visitors generated more than 75 percent of local sales tax revenue. That last figure is the one civic leaders repeat, because it means the traveler passing through Kanab is quietly paying for services the 4,683 residents use. The transient room tax, the levy on hotel stays that funds tourism promotion and offsets the wear that visitors put on roads and emergency services, ran a budget of roughly $5.1 million in the most recent year, and the county raised its room tax rate to 4.5 percent in October 2025 to keep pace with demand. Kanab layers its own municipal room tax on top of that.

The film heritage, meanwhile, no longer employs the town, but it still sells it. Kanab markets itself openly as Little Hollywood, keeps a Little Hollywood museum of preserved sets on the edge of town, and folds the movie story into the same visitor pitch as the parks. The Parry Lodge still operates, still trades on its guest book, and still gives a traveler a reason to spend a night on the story rather than just on the scenery. A room tax that films helped seed a century ago now funds the promotion of hikes and sanctuaries. The two eras are not separate businesses. They are one continuous habit of turning what the town has into what the town sells.

Reading the score

The Visitor Impact Score of 93 reflects a town that is very good at the visitor-facing fundamentals and still has room to grow at street level. Kanab’s strongest categories are the ones that follow directly from its basecamp role. Stay and itinerary scores high, an A, because a town whose entire economy is built on housing park visitors has learned to book them, package them, and keep them a second night. Anchor activity earns an A-minus, which is fair for a place that literally holds the permit door to one of the most sought-after hikes in America and sits inside a ring of national parks. Web and brand both land in the B-plus range, the signature and search identity of Little Hollywood and Base Camp doing real work online.

The softer numbers are the honest ones. Downtown vitality and curb appeal sit in the C range, and return and referral is not far above. This is the recurring shape of a gateway town. The scenery outside the city limits is a ten, and the main street is a work in progress, because for decades the town’s product was somewhere else. The multiplier of 1.11 says the panel found Kanab genuinely distinctive, a place whose hook is not interchangeable with the next exit. It is not the ceiling multiplier, and that too is fair. Kanab’s magic is partly borrowed from the parks it neighbors, and a town that leans on borrowed magic carries a quiet risk.

What is next, and the question underneath it

Kanab’s challenge is the pleasant kind, the challenge of a place that already works. The events of the last two years drew the risk in sharp relief. When the North Rim of the Grand Canyon closed for months after a wildfire destroyed several of its landmark structures, visitation to that gateway fell about 10 percent, and the towns that feed it felt the shortfall. A basecamp is only as busy as the destinations around it, and Kanab does not control those destinations. That is the argument for building more of its own identity, the film heritage most of all, into something a visitor comes for rather than merely passes through.

The path forward is the balance every gateway town has to strike. Lean too hard on the neighbors and a closed road or a dry lottery season can empty the motels. Build too inward and you spend money competing with the very landscapes that put you on the map. Kanab has the raw material for the middle path most towns lack: a real film legacy with sets and a lodge and a hundred years of stories, a sanctuary that draws its own devoted crowd, a state park of pink sand, and the keys to The Wave. The work is to knit those into a downtown worth an evening, so that the C-range main street catches up to the A-range surroundings.

The lesson Kanab offers other small towns is quieter than a signature festival or a single bold anchor. It is that location, honestly named and patiently worked, is itself a product. For a related look at how a town can manufacture a destination almost from nothing, see the flagship Creative City study on Thomas Dambo’s trolls in Detroit Lakes, where the draw was built rather than borrowed. Kanab shows the other model. Sometimes the town does not have to build the wonder. It only has to be the last comfortable place before it, and then give travelers one good reason of its own to slow down.