Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park

This corner of Utah has long been part of the homeland of the Southern Paiute people, who lived across the plateaus, canyons, and desert basins of the region and know its water sources, plants, and seasons intimately. Their descendants remain in the area today, with communities near Kanab and across the surrounding country.

Mormon pioneers settled the nearby town of Kanab in the 1870s, ranching and farming the high desert. In the twentieth century the dramatic scenery around Kanab drew Hollywood, and countless Westerns were filmed in the red-rock country nearby, earning the town its nickname of Little Hollywood. The dunes themselves were protected as a state park to keep this striking landscape open to visitors while safeguarding the rare life that depends on it.

The sand here began as Navajo sandstone, the same rock that forms the great cliffs and domes across southern Utah. As that soft sandstone weathers and crumbles, its grains are freed, and the coral-pink color comes from a thin coating of iron oxide, essentially rust, on each grain, the same mineral that reddens so much of the desert rock.

The wind does the rest. As it blows across the region it is squeezed and sped up through a notch between two mountain ranges, and where it slows on the far side it drops its load of sand, piling it into these dunes. Because the wind keeps blowing, the dunes are never still, marching slowly across the land and reshaping themselves ripple by ripple with every gust.

The star resident is the Coral Pink Sand Dunes tiger beetle, a small, fast, iridescent predator that lives only on these dunes and nowhere else on the planet. Part of the park is set aside as a conservation area to protect its habitat, a reminder that even this seemingly barren sand is a living ecosystem finely tuned to one particular place.

Look closely and the dunes reveal more life than they first seem to hold. Lizards dart across the sand, kangaroo rats and other small mammals come out at night, and the tracks of coyotes, foxes, and beetles crisscross the slopes each morning like a written record of the night before. Pockets of grasses, wildflowers, and shrubs cling to the dune edges, and the surrounding pine forest and cliffs add mule deer, birds, and more.

The dunes are a playground. Part of the park is open to off-road vehicles, while other areas, including a designated wilderness, are reserved for quiet foot travel, sandboarding, and photography. Coral Pink is also a certified dark-sky park, and on a clear night, with no city for many miles, the stars pour across the sky above the pale sand.

Spring and fall bring the most comfortable weather, warm days and cool nights ideal for hiking the dunes. Summer days can be intensely hot, and the sand hotter still, so early mornings and evenings are best. Winter can dust the pink sand with snow, a rare and beautiful sight, though nights turn cold and windy.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.