Paria Movie Set

Remnants of a frontier town built for a 1962 Western film

The Paria Movie Set is a ghost town that was never a real town — a collection of frontier-style wooden buildings about 65 km north-east of Kanab on the Cottonwood Canyon Road, constructed entirely for film and television productions from the 1960s onwards. The adobe and wood-frame buildings are now weathering into the surrounding red rock landscape, giving the site an eerie authenticity it never had when it was freshly built.

Access is on a dirt road (high clearance recommended in wet conditions) and free to visit. The BLM maintains the site minimally. It is most atmospheric in the low light of early morning or late afternoon, when the sandstone glows and the abandoned buildings cast long shadows. The setting — open canyon country with bands of red and cream rock in every direction — explains immediately why Hollywood came here.

things to do sight
A story
The Paria Movie Set was originally built in 1962 as the town of Bottleneck for the Rat Pack Western Sergeants 3 — a film almost nobody remembers today. The set was left standing and subsequently used in dozens of other productions. Clint Eastwood filmed The Outlaw Josey Wales here in 1975. By the time filming stopped, the Paria set had appeared in more Westerns than perhaps any other location in Utah, largely because it looked like the real thing rather than a studio construction.