Town Huntington, Emery County
A coal town at the mouth of Huntington Canyon, on the north edge of the San Rafael Swell
Huntington, Utah, where the pavement runs out east
Huntington is a coal and farming town of about 1,990 people at 5,790 feet, where Huntington Canyon comes out of the Wasatch Plateau onto the floor of Castle Valley in Emery County. West of Main Street the Energy Loop climbs a national scenic byway past 9,600 feet, and east of town the pavement runs out and the San Rafael Swell begins. That puts the Wedge, Buckhorn Wash and Jurassic National Monument an ordinary drive from a town that also has a warm reservoir, a grocery with the pharmacy inside it and gigabit fiber. Here is the honest version, plus every deeper Huntington page.
By Scott Buehler, Moving Utah
Updated October 2026
The short answer
Huntington is a coal and farming town of about 1,990 people at 5,790 feet, where Huntington Canyon comes out of the Wasatch Plateau onto the floor of Castle Valley. It works as a base town rather than a destination: nearly everything it is known for sits at the end of a road that starts on Main Street. West, the Energy Loop climbs a national scenic byway past 9,600 feet toward Fairview. East, the pavement runs out and the San Rafael Swell begins, putting the Wedge Overlook, Buckhorn Wash and Jurassic National Monument an ordinary drive from a Huntington breakfast.
Inside town the honest list is short and genuinely useful: a state park around a warm reservoir on the northwest edge, a grocery with the pharmacy inside it, schools through middle grade, and gigabit fiber. Everything larger is 21 miles north in Price. The energy economy that built the 1970s housing stock still runs the valley, and its long term is an open question rather than a settled one. Six deeper Huntington pages go under each corner of that, and the city guide covers the practical side of a move.
The shape of the place
A coal town at a canyon mouth, with the desert starting behind it
Huntington sits at about 5,790 feet on the floor of Castle Valley, exactly where Huntington Canyon comes out of the Wasatch Plateau and stops being a canyon. The 2020 census counted 1,914 people, which makes it the largest town in Emery County even though the county offices are ten miles south in Castle Dale. Four stockmen wintered cattle on the creek in 1875, a colony from Fairview moved in two years later and lived in dugouts, and the canal that made farming possible was finished in 1882.
The grid you drive through today mostly went up between 1896 and 1916, when alfalfa seed was the money crop and Huntington was the commercial center of the upper valley. The brick from that stretch is still the character of the place. Then in 1972 construction began on a coal fired power plant at the canyon mouth, and the town got a second building wave, a second economy and the identity most outsiders arrive with.
What the maps do not show is the geometry. Everything Huntington is known for sits at the end of a road that starts on Main Street and gets worse as it goes. West, SR-31 climbs from the valley floor to more than 9,600 feet in about half an hour on pavement. East, the pavement runs out and the San Rafael Swell begins. A town of about 1,990 people ends up as the practical trailhead for two entirely separate landscapes, and neither one of them is inside the town.
Huntington at a glance
1,914
people at the 2020 census
~5,790 ft
valley floor, under a 9,600 foot plateau
21 mi
north to Price, the hospital and the college
22 mi
east to the densest Jurassic bone bed known
The roads in and out
The roads out of town, and what each one reaches
Huntington runs on one state highway that doubles as Main Street and one that climbs a mountain. The rest of what this town is famous for begins where the pavement gives out, so it pays to sort out the surfaces before you set off.
| Leaving town | Reaches | Distance | Surface |
|---|---|---|---|
| SR-10 north | Price, the hospital, USU Eastern and the big shop | 21 miles, about 25 minutes | Paved, plowed, open all year |
| SR-10 south | Castle Dale, Orangeville, Ferron and eventually I-70 | 10 miles to the county offices, about 13 minutes | Paved, plowed, open all year |
| SR-31 west | The plant, the fly only water, Electric Lake and the plateau | The forest starts in minutes; the summit is over 9,600 feet | Paved and maintained all winter, with avalanche closures |
| SR-155 northeast | Cleveland, Elmo and the road to the dinosaur quarry | About 10 to 12 minutes to Cleveland | Paved to the towns, graded gravel beyond them |
Distances are rounded from the city guide. The fifth way out has no route number: a graded gravel road east into the San Rafael Swell, which is where the Wedge, Buckhorn Wash and most of what Huntington advertises actually sit.
There is no transit, no rail service and no interstate here. Everything in this valley assumes a vehicle, and a fair amount of it assumes a vehicle with a real spare and a full tank. Salt Lake City is about 140 miles and two and a half hours by way of Price and US-6, Provo is about 87 miles, and the full menu airport is Salt Lake. Fuel and groceries are on Main Street; the moment you turn east onto gravel there is nothing at all until you come out the other side.
The rhythm
Cold water one way, slickrock the other, and town in the middle
West and up is the Manti-La Sal National Forest and one of the better mountain roads in the state. SR-31 leaves Main Street, passes the power plant inside the first few miles, and climbs through aspen and spruce to over 9,600 feet on its way to Fairview and the Sanpete Valley. Along it: a five mile stretch of Huntington Creek below Electric Lake managed as artificial fly only water with a two fish limit, Electric Lake itself, and a small reservoir at the very top that produced a Columbian mammoth in 1988. The canyon page takes all of that.
East and down is the San Rafael Swell, and this is the claim Huntington puts on its own signage: the north entrance. It is a fair claim, with one translation. The northern Swell is reached on graded gravel roads that an ordinary car handles in dry weather and that you do not want to meet in a storm. The Wedge Overlook stands on a rim about a thousand feet above the San Rafael River, and Buckhorn Wash holds a painted panel older than two thousand years. Neither one is signposted from a highway with a services symbol. The Wedge page and the Buckhorn Wash page both say exactly what a passenger car can and cannot do.
Between the two, and easy to miss because it is so ordinary, is the third thing: a 237 acre state park on the northwest edge of town wrapped round a warm reservoir. It is not a destination in the way the other two are. It is a place where a household five minutes from any house in Huntington can swim, launch a boat, catch a bass and be home for dinner, which in a town of about 1,990 people at this distance from anywhere is worth more than the brochure suggests.
The honest summary is that Huntington works as a base rather than a destination, and it is an unusually good one. Very few towns this size sit between an alpine byway and a national conservation area, with a national monument twenty two miles out the third side. What the town asks in return is that you accept a Main Street with a grocery, a pharmacy, a couple of places to eat and not a great deal else, and that you drive to Price for the rest. The ranked list orders the day trips, and the moving page does the arithmetic on the drive.
Half an hour west puts you at nine thousand six hundred feet. Half an hour east puts you on gravel.
The energy economy
A power plant is the first thing you pass going up the canyon
Say it plainly, because a visitor will see it within four minutes of turning west off Main Street. The Huntington plant stands at the mouth of the canyon, two coal fired units with a combined capacity of about 1,037 megawatts, the second unit in service since July 1974 and the first since June 1977. PacifiCorp owns it, it is the largest thing in the valley by a wide margin, and the scenic byway that visitors drive for the aspen runs straight past it.
That is not an apology and it is not an advertisement. It is the reason this town has a 1970s housing stock, a tax base, schools and a grocery store, in a county whose population drifted downward through the 2010s. The mines around it have had a hard run of it in the 2020s. As of September 2026, one mine in the area closed for good in 2024 after an underground fire, another has stood idle since late 2025, and a long dormant mine near Joe's Valley resumed work in 2025 and has been hiring since. That roster moves quickly in this district, so confirm the current status with the operators before you plan a move around a job.
The plant's own timetable is the same kind of moving target. As of September 2026 both units remain in service, and PacifiCorp's filings have pushed a planned retirement date outward each time the company has set one. Whether that continues is a utility decision made outside the valley rather than a local one. The movers page sets out what a buyer should actually do about that, which is neither to panic nor to ignore it.
The canyon road also carries memory. In August 2007 a collapse at the Crandall Canyon mine up this road, and a second collapse during the rescue that followed, are remembered in a memorial that stands on the road toward the mine. Heroes Among Us, as it is called, sets bronze relief portraits on a curved wall and was unveiled in September 2008. It is not a tourist stop. It is worth knowing what it is before you drive past it.
The Swell's north door
The north entrance to the Swell, and the gravel roads that reach it
Huntington signs itself the north entrance to the San Rafael Swell, and the geography backs it up. The northern country of the Swell is reached from this side of the valley, and the two things most people come for, the Wedge Overlook and the Buckhorn Wash panel, both sit on the Buckhorn Draw road that runs out of Castle Dale and Cleveland just south and east of here.
One date sits behind almost everything east of the valley, and it is newer than most writing about the Swell. Federal law signed on 12 March 2019 put 216,995 acres into the San Rafael Swell Recreation Area, added a long roster of Emery County wilderness, and turned the dinosaur quarry east of town into Jurassic National Monument. All of it is managed by the BLM Price Field Office. The Wedge, the Buckhorn Wash and the monument pages each cover their own ground.
The BLM updates how this country is managed as its plans are finalized, and posted routes and camping rules can change with them, so check current conditions and designations with the field office before you plan a trip or buy with recreational access in mind.
The footnote on the whole claim is the surface. Almost none of it is paved. The roads are graded gravel that an ordinary car handles carefully in dry conditions and that turn genuinely difficult when wet, and there is no fuel, water, shop or reliable signal anywhere out there. The Wedge page and the Buckhorn Wash page both say exactly what a passenger car can and cannot do.
If you only have one day
One version of a good day out of Huntington
First thing
Drive Buckhorn Draw at dawn
The gravel is best before the wind gets up, and the painted figures on the wash wall take the early light better than anything at midday.
The Buckhorn page
Mid morning
Stand on the Wedge rim
A thousand feet of air between you and the San Rafael River, no gate, no fee and usually nobody else within shouting distance.
The Wedge page
Afternoon
See what came out of one hillside
Over 12,000 fossils from at least 74 animals, and more individual Allosaurus than any other site on the planet has produced.
The monument page
Evening
Fish the last light up the canyon
Fifteen minutes west of Main Street, five miles of creek below Electric Lake run artificial fly only with a two fish limit.
The canyon pageMore Huntington pages
Six pages that go deeper, and four of them end on gravel
Everything The Local has written about Huntington, in one place: the ranked list of what is actually here, the byway that climbs past 9,600 feet and the reservoir that gave up a mammoth, the rim above the San Rafael River, the painted panel in Buckhorn Wash, the richest Jurassic bone bed anyone has found, and the plain arithmetic of buying in a town of about 1,990 people twenty one miles from a hospital.
Scott Buehler
Moving Utah About Scott
Quick answers
Huntington, answered
In Castle Valley in Emery County, on SR-10 about 21 miles south of Price, where Huntington Canyon comes out of the Wasatch Plateau. Castle Dale, where the Emery County offices are, is about 10 miles south, and Ferron is about 25 minutes by road. Salt Lake City is roughly 140 miles and two and a half hours away by way of Price and US-6, and Moab is about 136 miles. Huntington is the largest town in the county at about 1,990 people, sitting at about 5,790 feet.
No. They are in Castle Dale, about 10 miles south on SR-10, which holds the courthouse, the county offices and Emery High School. Huntington is the larger town of the two and has been for a long time, which catches people out when they read a county map. Huntington keeps the biggest grocery store in the county, an elementary and a middle school, and a state park on its northwest edge.
Two things that have little to do with each other. It calls itself the north entrance to the San Rafael Swell, and the Wedge Overlook, the Buckhorn Wash pictograph panel and Jurassic National Monument are all reached from this side of the valley. The other identity is energy: a coal fired power plant with two units and a combined capacity of about 1,037 megawatts has stood at the canyon mouth since the mid 1970s and has been the biggest employer and taxpayer in the valley since it started.
The Swell begins where the pavement does not, a few miles east and south of town. The Wedge Overlook is roughly 45 minutes on about 20 miles of graded gravel running east from SR-10 north of Castle Dale, and Buckhorn Wash sits on the same road system. All of that ground is inside the San Rafael Swell Recreation Area, 216,995 acres created by federal law on 12 March 2019 and managed by the BLM Price Field Office.
It is the formal name for the Huntington and Eccles Canyons National Scenic Byway, designated on 15 June 2000 and running about 83 miles across three state routes. The branch that starts on Huntington Main Street is SR-31, roughly 47.7 miles from here to Fairview, climbing past 9,600 feet on the Wasatch Plateau. SR-264 and SR-96 make the northern branch toward Scofield and US-6. The name comes from the coal and power infrastructure the route passes.
Yes, at the top of the canyon road in the summer of 1988. Dam work at the small reservoir up there turned up bone at roughly 9,000 feet, and most of a bull Columbian mammoth was recovered over the weeks that followed. Nobody had found one that high anywhere in North America before. Mind the naming trap: this is not the warm water at the state park on the town edge. The bones are curated by the museum in Price.
Inside town the list is short and genuinely useful. Huntington State Park covers 237 acres around a warm reservoir on the northwest edge, with swimming, waterskiing, a boat ramp, 22 camping units and showers, and largemouth bass, bluegill and channel catfish in the water. Heritage Days in late June brings a rodeo and a parade down Main Street. Beyond that, everything Huntington is known for starts with a drive.
Yes, with a caveat worth taking seriously. SR-31 is not a gated seasonal road; the state keeps it plowed through the winter, so it stays a legal crossing to the Sanpete Valley in January. What it also is, though, is a pass above 9,600 feet in avalanche country, and slides have closed it for days at a time, most recently a stretch of about fifteen miles for four days in March 2023. Check UDOT conditions on the day you travel and keep the long way round in mind.
Twenty one miles. Castleview Hospital in Price is the regional facility, about 25 minutes north on SR-10, with a 24 hour emergency department, surgery, orthopaedics and obstetrics. Closer in, Emery Medical Center in Castle Dale, ten miles south, runs family practice and urgent care, and Huntington keeps a pharmacy inside the grocery store on Main Street. Specialist care means Provo or Salt Lake, a drive worth pricing into any move made for health reasons.
Thinking about Huntington? Start with the water shares, then the drive
In this valley the two questions that decide a purchase are what irrigation shares actually convey and whether they were delivered in the last dry year, and whether your household can live with twenty one miles between the front door and an emergency room. Tell me what you are weighing and I will put you with an Emery County partner agent who works this market, and stay on the file for the homework and the financing side.
Or call Scott: (435) 357-4345or send Scott a message
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