Cannonville, Utah From Duck Creek Village: The Paria Valley Town at the Kodachrome Turnoff

Cannonville is a town of 186 people (2020 Census) in Garfield County, Utah, at about 5,900 feet in the Paria River valley. From Duck Creek Village Inn it sits 57 road miles east, about an hour and 17 minutes by car: Highway 14 east, US-89 north, then Highway 12 east past the Bryce Canyon turnoff and down through Tropic.

Most Bryce traffic never sees the place. Cannonville sits 12 miles past the park turnoff, at the point where two roads leave Highway 12 for the south. Kodachrome Basin Road runs paved to the state park. Cottonwood Canyon Road leaves pavement behind and heads for US-89 across the monument. The town is the corner you turn at.

The drive down from Duck Creek

The road to Cannonville runs east and keeps losing height. Leg one covers 10.6 miles on Highway 14 to Long Valley Junction. Leg two follows US-89 north past Hatch to the Highway 12 junction at mile 31. Leg three climbs through Red Canyon onto the Paunsaugunt Plateau and reaches the Bryce roundabout at mile 45.

Stay on Highway 12 at the roundabout. The road drops off the east face of the plateau into Tropic, follows the valley 5 miles south, and puts you on Cannonville’s main street at mile 57. Henrieville sits 3.5 miles farther east.

Our Tropic post covers the grade and the town above this one. For the park legs, the entrance fee and the stops along the way, see the Bryce Canyon distance breakdown.

Clifton, the night water and the move upstream

Settlers laid out a town called Clifton around 1874 and named it for the cliffs above the site. Water decided its future. The town’s own history says that in the dry summer of 1877 the Paria carried water at night and not by day, and Utah History To Go adds that families hauled drinking water from Bryce Spring.

That same year the settlement moved about a mile and a half upstream to steadier water and took the name Cannonville, after the church leader George Q. Cannon. The town counted 273 people by 1890, more than it has today.

Water stayed the story. The Park Service says the Tropic Ditch, dug through the Bryce rim and finished in 1892, has watered fields in Tropic and Cannonville every year since, except during the drought of 2002. In the 1970s and 1980s Mayor Laurie Dea Holley’s water project took the town supply from six gallons a minute to one hundred.

The visitor center and the monument

The Bureau of Land Management runs a monument visitor center at 10 Center Street, and its page now reads “closed until further notice.” The BLM’s March 3, 2026 hours notice repeats that line and sends visitors to the Escalante Interagency Visitor Center instead. For road questions, the Paria River District answers at 435-341-0550.

The monument around the town also changed this year. A presidential proclamation signed July 13, 2026 cut Grand Staircase-Escalante to about 181,541 acres. Our Escalante post covers that change and the drive past it.

Cottonwood Canyon Road starts beside the visitor center. The BLM calls it a “rugged and scenic 47-mile dirt road” to US-89. Treat anything past the Kodachrome turnoff as a separate trip that needs a dry forecast and a call to the district first.

Weather: warmer days, colder nights than the rim

Cannonville has no NOAA station with normals of its own. The closest one sits about 5 miles southeast at Kodachrome Basin, 5,805 feet, close to the town’s height. Bryce Canyon headquarters, 7,890 feet up on the rim, makes the comparison.

Days in the valley run 8 to 12 degrees warmer than the rim in every month. Nights tell another story. In 6 of 12 months the valley station’s normal low sits below the rim’s, even with 2,085 feet less altitude, and the gap peaks from November through January at 1.5 to 2.4 degrees. Cold air sinking into low ground on clear nights is the usual explanation, and the numbers fit it.

For a November trip that means shirt-sleeve afternoons and frost on the windshield the next morning, with a valley night as cold as a November night at the inn’s height, or colder. The snow gap is the larger difference: the rim averages more than three times the valley’s snowfall.

Quick answers about Cannonville, Utah

Where is Cannonville, Utah?

In Garfield County on Highway 12, in the Paria River valley 5 miles south of Tropic and 16 road miles from the Bryce Canyon visitor center.

What county is Cannonville in?

Garfield County. Kodachrome Basin, a few miles south, lies across the line in Kane County, the same county as Duck Creek Village.

What is the elevation of Cannonville?

About 5,900 feet, some 2,500 feet below Duck Creek Village Inn.

What airport is near Cannonville?

Bryce Canyon Airport sits 13.5 road miles away at 7,590 feet, and no airline serves it. Cedar City and St. George carry the commercial flights.

What time zone is Cannonville in?

Mountain Time, the same clock as Duck Creek Village, with daylight saving time in summer.

Cannonville makes a long day from the mountain and a warm one in the shoulder season. Come back up Highway 12 and Highway 14 to a cabin at Duck Creek Village Inn, with the aspens and the pines outside the door.