Five Parks, One Hub: Kanab at the Center of the Grand Circle

Draw circles on a map around the five major federal public lands nearest to Kanab and you begin to understand why this town calls itself the center of the Grand Circle. Zion National Park is about forty miles to the northwest. Bryce Canyon National Park is roughly eighty miles to the north. The north rim of the Grand Canyon lies approximately eighty miles to the south. Glen Canyon National Recreation Area stretches to the east along the Colorado River. And Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument wraps around the town on nearly every side.

No other town of Kanab's size in the American West sits at the intersection of so much protected landscape. The five parks together represent millions of acres of geological terrain so concentrated in its drama that it attracted five separate major federal designations. The Grand Canyon drops a vertical mile through two billion years of Earth's geological record. Zion offers sandstone walls rising up to about two thousand feet above a narrow river. Bryce Canyon arranges thousands of delicate spires in a natural amphitheater unlike anything else on earth.

For travelers making the Grand Circle route through southern Utah and northern Arizona, Kanab is the inevitable stopover, the place where the roads converge. The hotels, outfitters, restaurants, and visitor services that have grown up around this reality have transformed a small ranching and farming town into one of the most visited communities in the American West. The landscape did not change. The travelers came to the landscape, and Kanab is where they sleep.