Kanab sits at the bottom of Utah on US-89, about an hour east of St. George via the back road through Hurricane and Colorado City. The town is wedged between the Vermilion Cliffs to the south and the long red mesa wall to the north; the Arizona line is six miles away. Kanab is a town that has been three different towns in a hundred and fifty years — Mormon outpost, Western film capital, and Best Friends gateway — and the present-day version contains all three.
Mormon outpost on the Arizona line
The first settlers arrived in 1864, were driven out by Navajo raids within a year, and resettled permanently in 1870 under the missionary Jacob Hamblin. Kanab functioned for decades as the southern frontier of the Mormon corridor — the road from Salt Lake ended here, the Colorado River was the impassable southern barrier, and the town built its economy on cattle and sheep grazing on the high country to the north. The pioneer-era street grid still defines the downtown; Center Street runs east–west and Main Street runs north–south, and most of the older masonry buildings are within a few blocks of the intersection.
Little Hollywood
Between 1924 and the late 1970s, more than a hundred Western films and television series shot on location in and around Kanab. The combination of red-rock cliffs, sand dunes, accessible canyon country, and a town small enough to host Hollywood crews on a single hotel block made Kanab one of the principal Western-genre filming locations in the country. *Stagecoach* was here. *The Lone Ranger* television series shot here. *Planet of the Apes*, the 1968 Heston version, used the dunes east of town. John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Maureen O'Hara, and Henry Fonda stayed at the Parry Lodge on Center Street — the lodge is still operating and still trades on the framed studio photographs in the lobby. The Little Hollywood Movie Museum on Center Street preserves the sets, costumes, and prop-room artifacts.
Best Friends and the second pivot
In 1984 a group of founders bought 3,700 acres of red-rock canyon north of town — Angel Canyon — and started Best Friends Animal Sanctuary on the site. Forty years later it is the largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the country, hosting 1,600 to 1,800 dogs, cats, horses, pigs, rabbits, birds, and other animals at any given time. The sanctuary draws roughly 30,000 visitors a year, runs a paid volunteer program that fills the town's lodging through the off-season, and has employed Kanab residents in numbers that rival the school district. The Best Friends pivot turned Kanab from a fading film town into one of the few rural economies in the Mountain West that grew through the 2000s without depending on extractive industry.
The permit town
Kanab is the gateway for some of the most-controlled hiking in the U.S. The BLM Kanab Field Office issues the daily Wave permits (Coyote Buttes North), the White Pocket access permits, and the Buckskin Gulch overnight permits. Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park sits 22 miles northwest. The Toadstool Hoodoos, Belly of the Dragon, Diana's Throne, and the slot-canyon network of Peek-a-Boo and Spooky are all within an hour. The Greyhound Gathering each May, the Western Legends Roundup each August, and the Best Friends volunteer rhythm fill the town's calendar. It is the only town in the 435 where a Hollywood-era hotel, a 3,700-acre animal sanctuary, and the office that decides who gets to walk on the most-photographed sandstone in the world all sit within five blocks of each other.