Welcome back to National Parks & other public lands with T! If you are seeing this on Twitter or Facebook, please visit the blog to see all of the photos and read the story by clicking the link.
We visited the Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park to help break up the long drive from Capitol Reef to Las Vegas. This park is home to ancient sand dunes created by the wind blowing eroding Navajo sandstone through a notch between the Moquith and Moccasin mountains. The red sandstone results in the unique pink color of the sand in this area.
We stopped by the visitor center first to pay our nominal entrance fee and looked at their collection of sands from around the world.
Next, we parked by the viewing platform. If you don’t like sand in your shoes, you can get a good view of the dunes just standing on the boardwalk area. This park is at an elevation of 6000 feet and the dunes are estimated to be between ten to fifteen thousand years old.
We took the short trail through the dunes from there, with signs along the way about the geology of the dunes, the vegetation that grows there and a rare indigenous beetle.
There were people driving ATVs up and down the dunes further out. These dunes can shift up to 50 feet per year because of the constant wind.
The Coral Pink Sand Dunes have provided the backdrop for several movies, including The Greatest Story Ever Told and Arabian Nights. There have been over 170 movies and television episodes filmed in and around Kanab.
We stopped in the nearby town of Kanab for a bite to eat before continuing on our journey. We walked down the street until we found Houston’s Trail’s End. This was a nice diner with a Western vibe to it (a lot of the movies filmed in Kanab were John Wayne movies.)
To see my other posts from this Utah trip, please click below:
- Zion: Kolob Canyons
- Zion
- Grand Staircase Escalante
- Bryce
- Capitol Reef: Cathedral Valley
- Goblin Valley State Park
- Capitol Reef: Hickman Bridge
- Capitol Reef: Scenic Drive
- Capitol Reef: Panorama Point
- Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park
Location: 12500 Sand Dune Road, Kanab, UT 84741
Designation: State Park
Date designation declared: 1963
Date of my visit: 4/14/2017
Lovely photos. I love dunes, but they can make you tired when walking through them!
Thanks! Yes, just walking the short loop was exhausting.
A hidden pink gem! On a road trip 2+ years ago, we had an unplanned stop in Kanab when we underestimated the travel time from Chandler AZ to Salina UT. But we were then happy about it because the next day, we did a side trip to Coral Pink Sand Dunes after seeing the road sign and getting intrigued.
We found it by accident too, when I was searching the map for a good stopping point between Capitol Reef and Pipe Springs. Never heard of it before that.
Such is the joy of traveling 🙂