Up the canyon Parowan
The turning everybody drives past
Yankee Meadows, up First Left Hand Canyon.
Five miles up the road to Brian Head there is a left turn that almost nobody takes, and it climbs past a creek and a wall of red towers to a reservoir at 8,655 feet. This is where Parowan actually goes in the summer. Here is the road, the season, and an honest account of what the last few miles ask of a vehicle.
Start here
Five miles up the highway, then turn left.
Everybody driving out of Parowan on State Route 143 is going to Brian Head, and about five miles up the canyon there is a turning most of them never take. It is signed for Yankee Meadows and locals call the canyon it climbs First Left Hand, which tells you how the naming works around here and roughly nothing else.
What is up it is the reason this town survives July. A creek at the bottom with a picnic area on it, red rock formations standing over the road, then a steady climb through aspen and fir to a reservoir sitting at 8,655 feet. That is more than 2,600 feet above the valley floor, which in practical terms means a twenty degree difference in the afternoon and a jumper in the evening.
The reservoir is a working piece of water rather than a resort. Trout fishing, paddleboards and non motorised boating, camping around it and dispersed sites in the meadows, and no facilities to speak of. On a July Saturday there are people there. On a Tuesday in September there may be nobody.
Yankee Meadows at a glance
8,655 ft
the elevation of the reservoir
~10 mi
from town, half of it climbing
Summer
and autumn only, snow closes it
Free
to reach, with fees at developed sites
The canyon itself
Bowery Creek, Vermillion Castle, and then the climb.
The first thing you meet after leaving the highway is the Five Mile picnic area, tucked in beside Bowery Creek under juniper, scrub oak and maple. It is a day use area rather than a campground, there is no drinking water, and it is the best twenty minute stop in the canyon for anybody who does not intend to drive the whole thing.
Above it the red formations start. Vermillion Castle is the big one, a set of towers and buttresses of deep red rock standing over the road, and there is a developed campground below it for people who want something with facilities rather than a meadow. Further along, another formation carries the name Noah's Ark, which is the sort of thing pioneers did to skylines and which sticks whether or not you can see the resemblance.
Then the road turns to work. It leaves the pavement, gains elevation steadily through the timber, and comes out at the reservoir with the high plateau country opening up behind it. In dry summer conditions ordinary cars make this and plenty do, but it is graded dirt with rough sections, and low clearance and wet weather are a poor combination on it.
There is one thing about the autumn that is worth planning around. The maple in the lower canyon turns before anything else in the county, and the aspen higher up turns after it, so from late September into October you can drive from one end of the leaf season to the other inside forty minutes. Cedar City's canyon gets the attention for that. This one is quieter.
Check the road with the Dixie National Forest before an early or late season trip. The opening and closing of this road are set by snow and by the state of the surface after the melt, not by a date on a calendar, and it is common for the reservoir to be unreachable well into the early summer in a heavy year. The Dixie National Forest publishes current conditions and closures, and a call to the Cedar City ranger district settles it. Do not take a summer trip report as evidence of what the road is doing this week.
What people do up there
Trout, paddles and a great deal of nothing.
Yankee Meadows is a trout reservoir and it fishes the way a high mountain reservoir fishes: better early and late in the day, better early and late in the season, and unpredictably in the middle of a hot August. Bank fishing works, and so does anything you can carry in and float, which is the general shape of the boating here.
Camping runs two ways. There are developed sites lower in the canyon with facilities, and there is a designated dispersed area up at the meadows for people equipped to look after themselves. Dispersed camping in a national forest carries its own rules about how long you may stay, how far you must be from water and what you do with everything you brought, and those rules get revised, so read the current ones rather than the ones you remember.
The other thing people do here is nothing at all, and I would defend it as the main event. This is a reservoir at 8,655 feet with a rim of timber round it, twenty minutes from a town that is over ninety in July, and a folding chair, a flask and an afternoon is a complete plan. Parowan residents have been treating it that way for a very long time.
What this canyon is not is the ski road. That is the highway you turned off, and it has its own page, because the drive to Brian Head and the drive to Yankee Meadows have almost nothing in common beyond the first five miles.
The valley hits ninety and the reservoir sits at 8,655 feet with a breeze on it. That is the entire argument, and it is the reason half the town disappears up this canyon on a July weekend.
Keep reading
More of Parowan on The Local.
1851
The Mother Town
Sent here to make iron in 1851. The ironworks failed and the town is still standing.
Read the guideThe road up
The Patchwork Parkway
Eighteen miles, 4,600 feet, and a name that comes from a stack of quilts.
Read the guideThe shelf
Parowan, from a local
Southern Utah's first town, a notch full of rock art, and a road that climbs 4,600 feet.
Read the pageQuick answers
The canyon, answered.
Take State Route 143 out of the top of Parowan and turn off around the five mile marker onto the signed Yankee Meadows road, which locals call First Left Hand Canyon. From there it is roughly another five miles of climbing to the reservoir, past the Five Mile picnic area on Bowery Creek and the red formations at Vermillion Castle. The lower part is paved and the upper part is not, and the whole trip is about ten miles from town.
In dry summer conditions, generally yes, and plenty of people do. The road above the picnic area is graded dirt with rough sections and a good deal of climbing, so low clearance vehicles have a harder time of it and wet weather makes it a poor idea in anything. It is also seasonal: snow closes it, and in a heavy winter it can stay unreachable well into the early summer. Check current conditions with the Dixie National Forest rather than assuming.
Trout fishing from the bank or from anything you can carry in and float, paddleboarding and non motorised boating, camping at developed sites lower in the canyon or in the designated dispersed area at the meadows, and sitting still at 8,655 feet while the valley below runs into the nineties. There are no services up there, no drinking water at the picnic area and nothing to buy, so everything you need goes in the car in Parowan.
8,655 feet, which is more than 2,600 feet above Parowan and puts it firmly in the high country. In practice that means an afternoon temperature roughly twenty degrees below the valley, evenings that get properly cold even in July, and a season that starts later and ends earlier than the calendar suggests. It also means the altitude is real if you have driven up from somewhere near sea level that morning.
This canyon, and it is quieter than the well known one. The maple in the lower part of First Left Hand Canyon turns before anything else in the county, and the aspen higher up turns after it, so through late September and into October you can drive from one end of the leaf season to the other in about forty minutes. Cedar Canyon on the far side of the valley gets most of the attention and most of the traffic.
Twenty degrees cooler, twenty minutes from the door.
This canyon is a large part of why people who move to Parowan stay in Parowan, and it is the sort of thing that does not show up in a price comparison at all. If you are weighing this valley against somewhere warmer and flatter, that trade is worth talking through properly.