The 2020 Census counted 393 residents in ZIP code 84762, spread across 2,211 housing units. Duck Creek Village has no census boundary of its own, and almost every house on the mountain is a cabin somebody visits rather than lives in.
How Many People Live in Duck Creek Village, Utah?
About 400 people live in Duck Creek Village year round. The 2020 Census counted 393 residents inside ZIP code 84762, the code that covers the village and the cabin subdivisions around it. Those 393 people share 2,211 housing units. Duck Creek Village has no boundary of its own in Census records, so the ZIP code is the tightest official count anyone can give you.
Five and a half houses per resident. That ratio drives everything you will notice on a trip here, from the restaurant that shuts after Labor Day to the July weekend when the trailhead parking runs out by nine.
The village has no census boundary, so the ZIP does the work
Duck Creek Village sits in Kane County at 8,507 feet, unincorporated, with no mayor and no town council. Kanab is a city. Orderville, Glendale and Alton are towns with drawn limits and their own census rows. Duck Creek Village is a name on a map with a post office ZIP attached to it.
Feed the inn’s coordinates into the Census Bureau geocoder and the incorporated place layer comes back empty. So does the census designated place layer, the one that covers unincorporated communities big enough to count on their own. Run the identical query at Dammeron Valley down in Washington County and it returns Dammeron Valley CDP, 871 residents. The layer works. Duck Creek Village is not in it.
Three official geographies do cover the village. ZIP code tabulation area 84762 is the tightest of them at 171 square miles, and it is the one every population question ends up answering.
| Measure | 2020 Census |
|---|---|
| Residents, ZIP 84762 | 393 |
| Housing units, ZIP 84762 | 2,211 |
| Land area | 171 square miles |
| People per square mile | 2.3 |
| Kane County, whole | 7,667 residents |
| Census place boundary | none |
Two federal numbers, and the one the internet keeps quoting
Search for the Duck Creek Village population and most sites hand you 132. That figure comes from the American Community Survey, a rolling sample rather than a head count, and it carries a margin of error of plus or minus 115 people. The honest reading of the survey is that the true value sits somewhere between 17 and 247. Aggregator pages print the 132 and drop the error bar, which turns a wide range into a false precision.
The 2020 Census is a different instrument. It tries to count every household rather than sample a few, and it put ZIP 84762 at 393 residents. For a place this small, the full count beats the survey, because a sample of a hundred scattered mountain households carries error bars wider than the answer.
Both numbers agree on the part that matters. Of the 2,411 housing units the survey found, 2,309 sat vacant, and the survey classified every one of those as seasonal, recreational or occasional use. None sat for rent, and none sat for sale.
| American Community Survey, 2020 to 2024 | ZIP 84762 |
|---|---|
| Population estimate | 132, plus or minus 115 |
| Housing units | 2,411 |
| Occupied homes | 102 |
| Vacant homes | 2,309 |
| Seasonal share of vacant homes | 100 percent |
A county seat’s worth of houses, a hamlet’s worth of people
Movie Ranch Road, the village’s business strip. Photo by An Errant Knight, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Set Duck Creek against the incorporated towns down the mountain and the shape of the place lands hard. Kanab, the Kane County seat, holds 2,209 housing units. ZIP 84762 holds 2,211, a difference of two. Kanab has 4,683 residents against Duck Creek’s 393, a twelvefold gap.
Orderville, the nearest incorporated town on the US-89 side, runs the ratio the other way: 598 people in 260 homes, two and a third residents per house. That is what a town looks like. Duck Creek runs 0.18 residents per house.
| Community, 2020 Census | People and homes |
|---|---|
| Kanab city | 4,683 people, 2,209 homes |
| ZIP 84762, Duck Creek | 393 people, 2,211 homes |
| Orderville town | 598 people, 260 homes |
| Glendale town | 312 people, 148 homes |
| Alton town | 118 people, 61 homes |
Those 2,211 units are not apartment blocks. They are cabins on lots in Duck Creek, Swains Creek, Strawberry Valley and the subdivisions off the forest roads, most of them owned by families in St. George, Las Vegas and the Wasatch Front who drive up for a week at a time. You can see the pattern from Highway 14: roofs in the timber, a meadow, more roofs, and long gaps of nothing between them.
Kane County governs it, and a service district runs it
No city hall exists on this mountain. Kane County handles the local government, from the county seat in Kanab, an hour and a half south. Kids on the mountain belong to Kane School District.
Day to day, the body that touches your stay most is the Cedar Mountain Service District, which Kane County created by resolution in 1995 under Utah’s Special Service District Act. It started with fire and EMS, picked up snow removal in 2004 and dust suppression in 2021, and covers 94 square miles of federal, state and private land north and south of Highway 14 from the Iron County line to US-89. Lot owners pay assessed fees to fund it. Its own published mailing address is a highway contract route box, the rural delivery arrangement the Postal Service uses where city carrier routes do not reach.
| Function | Responsible body |
|---|---|
| Local government | Kane County, unincorporated |
| Fire and EMS | Cedar Mountain Service District, 1995 |
| Snow removal | Same district, added 2004 |
| Dust suppression | Same district, added 2021 |
| Schools | Kane School District |
| District coverage | 94 square miles |
The number to plan around
Nobody publishes a summer figure for Duck Creek Village, and we will not invent one. Do the arithmetic yourself and the scale becomes obvious: 2,211 housing units, most of them cabins that sleep six to twelve, filling up over a holiday weekend. The village you meet on the Fourth of July and the village you meet in mid-February have little in common, and almost nobody sees the size of that swing coming.
That swing sets the rules for a trip. In July and August the ATV trails and the places to eat run at capacity, and booking late costs you. From November through April the mountain empties, the drive up Highway 14 from Cedar City turns into a weather question, and the one gas station closing at 6 pm matters more than anything else on your list. September and early October land between the two, which is why regulars book them first.
We run the inn here through all of it, including the months when 400 people have the plateau to themselves.
Quick answers
Is Duck Creek Village an incorporated town? No. It is an unincorporated community in Kane County, Utah, with no mayor, no town council and no city limits. Kane County provides local government, and the Cedar Mountain Service District provides fire, EMS and snow removal.
Does the Census Bureau publish a population for Duck Creek Village? No. Duck Creek Village has no incorporated place boundary and no census designated place boundary, so the Bureau publishes no figure under that name. ZIP code tabulation area 84762 is the closest official stand-in, at 393 residents in 2020.
Search results say 132 people. Is that wrong? Not wrong, just incomplete. The 132 is an American Community Survey estimate for ZIP 84762 with a margin of error of plus or minus 115, meaning the survey itself places the answer between 17 and 247. The 2020 Census full count of 393 is the firmer number.
How many cabins are in the Duck Creek area? ZIP 84762 held 2,211 housing units in the 2020 Census. The American Community Survey counted 2,411 and classified 2,309 of them as seasonal, recreational or occasional use, which is about 96 percent of the housing stock.
Does anyone live in Duck Creek Village in the winter? Yes. A few hundred people stay through the snow, Highway 14 gets plowed all winter, and the service district runs snow removal on district roads. Services thin out, so plan a winter stay around a stocked kitchen rather than around restaurant hours.
