Belly of the Dragon: through the tunnel under Highway 89

Welcome to the Belly of the Dragon, a tunnel that runs right under Highway 89, carved out by floods into something that looks like the inside of a giant creature.

A few things before we go in. It gets dark in the middle, so have a flashlight ready. Your phone will lose GPS inside, which is fine: the tunnel story will already be playing. And this tunnel exists to carry flood water, so never go in if rain is in the forecast.

I'll tell you a story at each spot and stay quiet in between.

The road you drove in on has a long history. The route from Kanab to Mount Carmel became a state road in 1915, back when it was dirt and sand, and it became part of U.S. Highway 89 in 1926. Today it's one of the great scenic drives of the West, linking Zion, Bryce and the Grand Canyon.

But a road in canyon country has a problem: water. When a storm hits the plateau, runoff pours down these washes, and a highway built across a wash will eventually wash out. So the builders gave the water its own way through. Instead of crossing the road, the flood goes under it, through the tunnel just ahead.

And the floods have been sculpting that tunnel ever since. Every time a torrent of water and sand roars through, it scours the soft rock, leaving ripples and curves along the walls. That's how it got its name: inside, it feels like you're walking through the ribs of an enormous creature.

There's a short drop to get in, so help the little ones down. Inside, it curves enough to get dark in the middle, and the floor has a little channel worn along the bottom; many people stay to the right of it. You'll see graffiti, too. The same softness that let the water carve the ribs makes the rock easy to scratch, so please leave no marks of your own. Listen to how your voices echo.

You made it through the belly of the dragon. You're now on the far side of Highway 89, in the wash that feeds the tunnel.

Look at the cliffs around you. Geologists say this area holds the Carmel Formation, layers of limestone, mudstone and sandstone laid down in a shallow sea and on tidal flats about a hundred and seventy million years ago. In fact, the formation is named after the town just up the road, Mount Carmel, because it was first described here. Beneath it lies the Navajo Sandstone that forms the great walls of Zion.

Speaking of Zion, just up the road is another, much bigger tunnel. The Zion–Mount Carmel tunnel opened in 1930. It's more than a mile long, with windows cut into the cliff, and when it opened it was the longest tunnel of its kind in the country.

As you walk the wash, you're in the kind of country that made Kanab famous.

In 1924, a Kanab man named Whit Parry talked a Hollywood director into filming a western called The Deadwood Coach here, with the cowboy star Tom Mix and his horse Tony. In 1931, Whit and his brothers opened the Parry Lodge in Kanab, and for decades it housed movie stars: John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Maureen O'Hara and many more. About a hundred films were shot in the area. A director filming here in the 1940s nicknamed the town Little Hollywood, and the name stuck.

Look around. Red cliffs, sagebrush and juniper, a sandy wash: you can see why the cameras came.

This valley has been home to people for a very long time.

The Kaibab Band of Southern Paiute lived across this country for generations, from the Kaibab Plateau to springs between Kanab and Pipe Spring. When settlers arrived in the 1860s, they took over many of those springs, and Paiute farms dried up. The band suffered terrible losses in the years that followed. Their reservation, south of Kanab, was created in 1913, and the Kaibab Paiute still live there today.

The pioneer town of Mount Carmel was first settled in 1864, abandoned, then resettled in 1871. When John Wesley Powell surveyed the East Fork canyon nearby in 1872, he gave it a Paiute name: Parunuweap, roaring water canyon.

If the kids are tired, this is a fine place to turn back. If not, the trail keeps going up the wash.

This is as far as the trail goes. You've walked from a parking lot, through a dragon's belly and all the way up its wash.

On the way back, notice how the wash funnels toward the tunnel. Every bit of rain that falls on the slopes around you heads that way, down through the dragon and under the highway, eventually reaching the Virgin River and, far away, the Colorado.

When you reach the tunnel again, try walking it with your flashlight off for a moment, and let your eyes adjust. Thanks for exploring the Belly of the Dragon with me.