Old Paria: Ghost Town, Film Set, and the Fire of Two Thousand Six

About thirty-five miles east of Kanab on United States Highway Eighty-Nine, a dirt road turns north into a canyon where the Paria River cuts through striated walls of pink, red, and orange sediment. The canyon holds the site of the old Paria ghost town and, about a mile away, a Western movie set that stood for decades as a collection of weathered wooden facades.

Mormon settlers established a community at Paria in eighteen sixty-five, but the town was abandoned and resettled multiple times due to flooding and the extreme difficulty of life in such an isolated canyon. By the twentieth century, Paria was largely empty. Its remote location and dramatic scenery made it attractive to filmmakers, and beginning in the mid twentieth century, crews began shooting Westerns in the canyon. The most visible remnants of the film era were wooden building facades constructed to serve as a generic Western town backdrop for various productions, including episodes of the television series Gunsmoke and scenes from the Clint Eastwood film The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Those facades burned down in two thousand six in a fire widely attributed to arson. What remains today is managed by the Bureau of Land Management as a day-use site, where visitors can walk among the foundations of the original ghost town and the blackened remnants of the film set. The ruins sit in a landscape that still looks like a Western even without the props: cliffs of banded color, a river that runs muddy red after rain, and a silence broken only by wind and ravens.