The road up Virgin
Zion without an entrance station
Kolob Terrace Road, from the bottom.
It starts as an ordinary turning off the highway in the middle of Virgin, and twenty five miles later it puts you on a plateau at around 8,100 feet beside a reservoir, having gone in and out of Zion National Park several times without passing a single fee booth. Here is the drive, the season, and the gate that closes it for half the year.
Start here
Twenty five miles, and 4,600 feet of it.
Kolob Terrace Road leaves State Route 9 in the middle of Virgin and goes north, and there is nothing about the first mile of it that tells you what it is. It looks like a road to some houses. What it actually does is climb from the valley floor at roughly 3,500 feet to the end of the pavement at Kolob Reservoir at around 8,100 feet, in about twenty five miles.
On the way it crosses into Zion National Park, back out onto private and state ground, and back in again, more than once. The park's western section is not a fenced block; it is an irregular boundary drawn around canyon heads, and the road threads it. You will pass ranch gates and cattle guards inside land that is otherwise national park, because families held those inholdings before the boundary went round them.
There is no entrance station anywhere on this road. Nobody stops you, nobody sells you anything, and there is nowhere to buy a pass, a permit, a sandwich or a gallon of fuel between the highway and the reservoir. That is not the same as the park being free up here, and it is emphatically not the same as it being serviced. Sort what you need in the valley.
The drive itself
What goes past the window, in order.
The first stretch out of town is red rock and juniper and it climbs steadily without doing anything dramatic. Then the road tips up, the sandstone starts standing away on the right, and within a few miles you are looking across at cliff country that most Zion visitors never see because it faces the wrong way for the shuttle.
The Left Fork trailhead comes first of the ones people know, and it is the bottom up start for the Subway. Hop Valley follows, which is the way in to Kolob Arch and La Verkin Creek. Wildcat Canyon trailhead is roughly fifteen and a half miles up and is the busiest parking on the road, because several routes leave from it. The turn for Lava Point is above that. All of them are covered as walks on the trails page rather than here; on the drive they are simply the places where the cars are.
Above the trailheads the country changes completely. Ponderosa comes in, then aspen, and the red rock drops away behind you. By the time the pavement ends at Kolob Reservoir you are on a plateau top with meadows and a large body of cold water, and it is genuinely difficult to believe that the desert valley you left is forty five minutes behind you and nearly a mile below.
Past the reservoir the pavement stops and a dirt road carries on across the plateau, eventually dropping toward Cedar City by way of Kolob Road and Right Hand Canyon. It is a fine drive in a high clearance vehicle in dry conditions in late summer or autumn. It is a poor idea in spring, in a passenger car, or after rain, and the surface is unmaintained enough that a wet mile of it will change your day.
You can leave a hundred degree valley, gain a mile of elevation on pavement, and be standing in a meadow in a fleece, without ever queueing for anything.
The season
Half the year the road stops early.
This is the single most important practical fact about Kolob Terrace Road and it catches people every year. The upper road closes with the snow. In most years that has meant somewhere in November, and it generally does not open all the way through to Kolob Reservoir again until late April or May, depending entirely on how the winter went and how the assessment of the road afterwards goes.
It is not simply shut, though, and that is the nuance people miss. The lower stretch is plowed for the residents who live up there, historically to somewhere in the region of 6,500 feet, which is roughly halfway. So in February you can drive out of town, gain a couple of thousand feet, and get to a gate across the road with snow behind it. That is a genuinely good winter outing and it is not the drive you read about.
The seasonal facilities follow the road. Lava Point Campground opens for a summer season, usually somewhere from late spring into October, and shuts with the weather. The plateau above the reservoir is on its own calendar again, generally accessible from spring into December in dry conditions. Nothing up here runs to a fixed date, because nothing up here is decided by a calendar.
The high point
Lava Point, and six campsites.
Lava Point is the highest place in Zion National Park you can drive to, and the overlook there gives you the park from above rather than from inside. Everything the canyon does to you from the floor, it does in reverse from up here: the towers you crane at from the shuttle become shapes below a rim.
The campground at Lava Point is six primitive sites and nothing else. There is no water. It sits at high elevation on the terrace, it opens for a summer season, and in recent years the sites have been reservable through Recreation.gov up to fourteen days in advance rather than run first come first served. The park is also explicit that a Lava Point site cannot be built into the itinerary of a wilderness backpacking trip, which trips people planning the long traverse across the park.
Six sites for a national park is a rounding error, and that is the appeal. If you get one, you are camping at altitude in a national park with almost nobody near you, forty five minutes from a valley where the overnight low in July does not go below eighty. Check the current fee, season and reservation rules before you count on any of it; all three have changed in the last few years.
Do not plan a long vehicle up this road. The park discourages large vehicles on Kolob Terrace Road and the campground at the top is not built for them. Between the grades, the width, the lack of turning space and the total absence of services for twenty five miles, this is a road for a car or a van and not for a coach or a big fifth wheel. Confirm the current vehicle guidance with the park before you commit to towing anything up it.
The climb on two wheels
One of the great road climbs in the state.
Ask a road cyclist in Southern Utah for the ride and a good number of them will say this one. It is paved the whole way to the reservoir, it is quiet by the standards of anything near a national park, and it gains something in the order of 4,600 feet in about twenty five miles, which is a climb with a European profile in a desert county.
The practical notes are the ones nobody puts on a route file. There is no water on the road, at all, and the last chance is in Virgin. The temperature difference between the bottom and the top can be twenty five or thirty degrees, so the descent is a completely different garment problem from the climb. Traffic is light but the shoulder is not consistent and there are cattle guards. And the wind on the terrace top is its own event.
The season is short at both ends: you want the gate open, and you do not want the valley at its July temperature for the first hour. Late spring and September into October are the windows most people ride it in.
Keep reading
More of Virgin on The Local.
Permits and trails
The Subway and Hop Valley
The lotteries, the wilderness permits, and the three trails that need neither.
Read the guideAfter dark
The dark sky
An ordinance, no certificate, and the darkest sky on this stretch of highway.
Read the guideThe shelf
Virgin, from a local
The town itself: the river bottom, the road up, the Pocketville years and the mountain.
Read the pageQuick answers
The road, answered.
In the middle of Virgin, Utah, off State Route 9 between Hurricane and Springdale. It heads north from the highway and climbs from roughly 3,500 feet on the valley floor to about 8,100 feet at Kolob Reservoir, where the pavement ends, in the region of twenty five miles.
There is no entrance station on the road, so nobody will stop you and there is nowhere to buy a pass. That is not the same as Zion being free from this side: a park pass is still required to use the park, and permits for the Subway and for overnight wilderness travel are separate systems issued through Recreation.gov. Sort all of it in the valley, because cell coverage disappears within a few miles of the highway.
Not to the top. The upper road closes with the snow, typically somewhere in November, and generally does not open all the way to Kolob Reservoir again until late April or May. The lower stretch is plowed for the residents who live up there, historically to somewhere around 6,500 feet, so a winter drive gets you a couple of thousand feet above the valley and then a gate. Check current status with the park and the county before setting off.
It is a poor idea. The park discourages large vehicles on this road, the campground at Lava Point is primitive and small, and there is no reliable place to turn something long around across twenty five miles with no services on them. A car or a van is the right tool. If you are towing, confirm the current vehicle guidance with Zion National Park before you commit.
Kolob Reservoir, a body of water of about 250 acres sitting at roughly 8,100 feet on the plateau, stocked with trout and cold enough in June to feel like a different state from the valley. Beyond it the pavement ends and an unmaintained dirt road carries on across the plateau and eventually down toward Cedar City. That continuation is seasonal, wants a high clearance vehicle and dry conditions, and is not a shortcut.
Allow about forty five minutes each way without stopping, and closer to two hours round trip once you factor in pulling over, which you will. If you add a walk at the top the whole thing becomes a day. There is no fuel, food or water anywhere on the road, so treat it as a self contained outing rather than a scenic detour on the way somewhere.
Most people drive past the turning.
That single road is why a valley of 700 people is worth a look rather than a wave through the windscreen. If you want to know what it is like to live at the bottom of it, or partway up it, that is exactly the conversation I have most often out here.