A Carousel for Missoula

A cabinetmaker's promise to the city council: give it a home, and he would carve the horses.

Acoma Sky City

Haak'u, the village on a sandstone mesa west of Albuquerque, seen only on the pueblo's own tours, with a mission whose roof beams were carried on foot from Mount Taylor.

Alabama Hills

Rounded golden granite under the Sierra wall, and Hollywoods oldest outdoor set.

Aladdin Coal Tipple

The last nineteenth-century wooden coal tipple believed to stand in the country, which fed Black Hills gold smelters and is now close to falling.

Alpine Loop Summit

The 8,000-foot high point of the Alpine Loop, face to face with Mount Timpanogos

Alta Ski Area

One of America's oldest and snowiest ski areas — ski-only, fiercely independent, and built on an old silver camp.

Alvord Desert

A twelve-mile playa in the rain shadow of Steens Mountain where, in December 1976, a deaf stuntwoman drove a rocket car to a women's land speed record she was not allowed to push past.

Amache National Historic Site

A Japanese American incarceration camp kept from vanishing by a Granada social studies teacher and three decades of his high school students, a national park unit since 2024.

Amargosa Opera House

A dancer painted her own audience on the walls of a desert hall and performed for them for forty years.

Amboy

Roy's Motel and Cafe and its 1959 neon boomerang, the most photographed lonely stop on Route 66.

Amboy Crater

A near-perfect black cinder cone off Route 66, one of California's youngest volcanoes and a National Natural Landmark.

American West Heritage Center

A living history farm spanning 160 acres of Cache Valley

Anasazi State Park Museum

Ruins of a 900-year-old Ancestral Puebloan village

Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest

Trees older than the pyramids, growing on white dolomite at ten thousand feet.

Animas Forks

A silver camp at 11,200 feet where the Animas River's three forks meet, with the 1879 Duncan house and its bay window still standing on the Alpine Loop.

Antelope Canyon

Tsé bighánílíní — where the water runs through the rock

Antelope Island State Park

A rugged island in the Great Salt Lake with free-roaming bison

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park

Six hundred thousand acres of badlands, slot canyons, and palm oases, and the biggest state park in California.

Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary

A wildlife sanctuary that is also the town's sewage works, because Arcata turned down the state's plan.

Arches National Park

Over 2,000 natural stone arches in one extraordinary landscape

Artist Point

The end of the Mount Baker Highway, a ridge between Baker and Shuksan below the ski area that holds the world record for snow in a single season.

Aspen Grove

The mountain-base trailhead for Mount Timpanogos and Stewart Falls

Astoria Column

A railroad's 1926 monument to its own route, wrapped in a 525-foot spiral of Oregon history that ends with the train pulling into Astoria.

Austin

A silver boomtown that hit ten thousand and fell to under two hundred — the living ghost town at the high middle of US-50

Aztec Ruins National Monument

A Chacoan great house on the Animas River, misnamed by settlers who thought the Aztecs built it, with original roofs nine centuries old and a great kiva rebuilt whole.

B Reactor

The first full-scale nuclear reactor started in September 1944 and died within a day, and was saved by spare fuel channels DuPont's engineers had insisted on.

Badwater Basin

The lowest ground in North America, a salt pan 282 feet below sea level under two miles of mountain.

Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial

A cedar wall running down to the dock where the first Japanese Americans were taken, and the story of the island newspaper that wanted them back.

Bald Mountain Pass

The highest point on the Mirror Lake Highway at 10,715 feet

Baldwin Lake Ecological Reserve

Pebble plains occur in this valley and nowhere else on earth, and the flowers on them are small enough that you have to lie down.

Bandelier National Monument

Rooms carved into soft volcanic tuff in Frijoles Canyon, named for a Swiss scholar who was led there in 1880 by a man from Cochiti Pueblo.

Bandon

A town at the mouth of the Coquille built near the site of an 1854 massacre, named for a town in Ireland, and burned in 1936 by the Irish gorse its founder planted.

Banks and the North Fork Payette

Where the Payette's two forks meet, below fifteen miles of continuous Class V whitewater beside the highway.

Bannack State Park

The first capital's second life: a county seat lost to the railroad, a courthouse turned hotel, a town that emptied slowly.

Barstow

The Mojave's rail-and-road hinge, where the Santa Fe yards and Route 66 meet at the Casa del Desierto Harvey House.

Basque Block

A merchant's 1864 brick house became the boardinghouse where herders from the Basque Country found beds, meals and their own language.

Battle Rock

Port Orford's founding legend, named for a battle by the man who fired the cannon and remembered by another witness, and by the people it happened to, as something else.

Bear Lake

The Caribbean of the Rockies — a turquoise lake straddling the Utah-Idaho border

Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge

The Bear River crosses this marsh twice: once in a canal into Bear Lake, and once in another canal on its way back out.

Bear Lake Raspberry Shakes

Legendary raspberry milkshakes from locally grown berries

Bear Paw Battlefield

The siege ground on Snake Creek where the Nimiipuu war of 1877 ended, and where seven years of exile began.

Bear Valley Dam

Big Bear Lake is an irrigation reservoir first, and in 1977 the town had to buy the dam to keep water in its own view.

Beartooth Highway

A road over the top of the world, built because a coal town's mines closed and it needed tourists instead.

Beatty

The town that water built and water kept — the Bullfrog boom's lone survivor, now Nevada's gateway to Death Valley, with wild burros wandering Main Street.

Beaver

A charming main street town with surprisingly good food

Beaver Mountain Ski Area

A family-owned ski hill that has been run by the same family since 1939

Beaverhead Rock

The hill Sacagawea recognized in August 1805, the first sure sign that her people were close.

Beecher Island Battleground

A battlefield whose island is gone: the veterans' memorial of 1905 washed away in the flood of 1935, its pieces reset on the riverbank, the reunion still held every September.

Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site

A cornfield with foundations in it by the 1960s, rebuilt from an army lieutenant's 1845 drawings in 160,000 machine-made adobes for the Bicentennial.

Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park

A gold camp frozen in "arrested decay" since 1911, beside a quarry of fifty-foot ichthyosaurs left in the rock where they died — the Silver Trails' long exhale into deep time.

Best Friends Animal Sanctuary

The largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States

Big Bear Solar Observatory

A reservoir dug for orange groves turned out to be one of the steadiest places on the continent to look at the sun.

Big Bend Recreation Area

A lazy loop of the Colorado with a sandy beach, riverside camping, and a well-known bouldering field

Big Hole National Battlefield

The government marked this ground for its soldiers in 1883 and left the Nimiipuu camp outside the line until the 1960s.

Big Obsidian Flow

Oregon's youngest lava flow, a square mile of black volcanic glass and gray pumice that poured out inside Newberry's caldera about 1,300 years ago.

Big Rock Candy Mountain

The real mountain that inspired the famous hobo folk song

Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge

A delta given back to the tide in 2009, and named for the Nisqually fisherman who was arrested more than fifty times for fishing his own river.

Bingham Canyon Mine

The largest man-made excavation on Earth

Bisbee

Queen of the Copper Camps — and the deportation it tried to forget

Bishop

The Eastern Sierras working capital, and the home of the Nüümü who were traded out of their own valley.

Black Canyon of the Bear River

A basalt gorge cut by a river that, most of the year, now runs past it in a pipe.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

Two men on a rubber air mattress floated through in 1901 to prove a tunnel could be built, past a cliff that drops some 2,250 feet to the river.

Blackwater Draw

The site between Clovis and Portales that gave the Clovis culture its name, found by a nineteen-year-old in 1929 and dug for decades inside a working gravel pit.

Blue Hole

A bell-shaped artesian spring in Santa Rosa, 81 feet deep and a steady 61 or 62 degrees, where divers from across the region learn to dive at altitude.

Blue Swallow Motel

A twelve-room tourist court on Tucumcari's stretch of Route 66, built in 1939, run for four decades by one woman, and lit by one of the most photographed motel signs on the road.

Boa Ogoi (Bear River Massacre Site)

The Northwestern Band bought back the ground where its people were killed in 1863, and is turning farm fields back into the river bottom they knew.

Boar's Tusk and the Killpecker Dunes

The throat of a vanished volcano made of rock from the mantle, standing over a fifty-five-mile river of dunes that crosses the Continental Divide.

Bodie State Historic Park

A gold town of ten thousand left exactly as it emptied, held in arrested decay at 8,375 feet.

Bombay Beach

The lowest town in America: a drowned resort turned open-air art colony, 223 feet below sea level.

Bonneville Dam

The first federal dam on the Columbia, where someone has counted the fish climbing its ladders every year since 1938, beside an island the Corps used as a dump for forty years.

Bonneville Salt Flats

A blindingly white desert where land speed records are born

Borah Peak Earthquake Fault Scarp

In 1983 the valley floor dropped seven feet in a second, and a truckload of hunters dropped with it.

Borrego Springs

A dark-sky town ringed by state park, with 130 metal beasts loose in the desert around it.

Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge

A Rio Grande refuge south of Socorro where cranes and geese winter by the tens of thousands on wetlands and fields kept by people, because the river no longer floods to make them.

Bosque Redondo Memorial

The state site at Fort Sumner that for decades told the story of an army post and an outlaw, remade with Diné and Ndé people into a memorial to those held here.

Bottomless Lakes State Park

Nine sinkhole lakes under red bluffs east of Roswell, named by vaqueros whose ropes never touched bottom, and set aside in 1933 as New Mexico's first state park.

Boulder

One of the last places in America to receive paved road access

Boulder Mountain

A 50-mile forested plateau at 11,000 feet with 80 alpine lakes

Boulder Mountain Lodge

An ecotourism lodge and James Beard-honored grill at the heart of Scenic Byway 12.

Bowling Ball Beach

Rows of stone spheres laid out on a shelf of rock that may have travelled hundreds of miles up the coast.

Box Canyon Springs

The eleventh-largest spring in the United States, pouring from the head of a dead-end canyon with water that sank into the lava far to the northeast.

Bozeman Trail at Bozeman Pass

The pass at the end of a gold-rush shortcut through other nations' hunting ground, the one road a Native war closed.

Brian Head

Utah's highest town — a ski-and-bike base camp at the top of Parowan Canyon

Bridal Veil Falls

A dramatic double waterfall cascading 607 feet into Provo Canyon

Brighton Resort

The Salt Lake Valley's longtime local ski hill — big snow, lots of night skiing, and high-speed quads to everything.

Bruce's Beach

Willa and Charles Bruce ran a seaside resort here for Black families until the city took the land in 1924. It came back in 2022.

Bruneau Dunes State Park

Sand dunes that stay where they are, in a bend the Snake River abandoned, under dark skies an hour from Boise.

Bryce Canyon Lodge

A 1925 National Historic Landmark perched on the canyon rim

Bryce Canyon National Park

The largest collection of hoodoos on Earth

Buckner Homestead

A pioneer apple orchard in a valley with no road in, still watered by the ditch the family dug from Rainbow Creek more than a century ago.

Buffalo Bill Center of the West

A memorial begun the year Buffalo Bill died that grew, wing by stone-walled wing, into five museums and a library under one roof.

Buffalo Eddy

Rock art on both banks of the Snake, made by the ancestors of the Nimiipuu over perhaps 4,500 years, and dated in part by what it shows.

Burr Trail Road

A jaw-dropping backcountry road through slot canyons to Capitol Reef

Butch Cassidy Boyhood Home

The restored Circleville cabin where the West's most famous outlaw spent his teens

C. M. Russell Museum

The cowboy artist's house and log studio, and the story of Nancy Russell, who turned his bar-tab paintings into a career.

Cajon Pass

The gap the San Andreas tore between two mountain ranges, and the doorway every westbound traveler has used for two centuries.

Calico Ghost Town

An 1881 silver boomtown in the calico-colored hills, saved and rebuilt by the founder of Knott's Berry Farm.

California Citrus State Historic Park

A state park that is still a working orange grove — the last big piece of Riverside's citrus landscape left standing.

California Trail Interpretive Center

A free, surprisingly ambitious BLM museum of the overland crossing — eight miles west of Elko, on the trail itself, where the California Trail met the Hastings Cutoff that doomed the Donner Party.

Campo de Cahuenga

The treaty that ended the fighting in California was signed on this ground, and the building it was signed in is now under the boulevard.

Cannonville

Gateway to Kodachrome Basin and the Grand Staircase

Canyon de Chelly

Tséyiʼ — five thousand years, the Long Walk, and the road home

Canyon Overlook Trail

A short, exposed hike just east of the tunnel to a thousand-foot view down into Zion Canyon

Canyon Pintado

Fremont figures and Ute horses painted and pecked along fifteen miles of Highway 139, named the Painted Canyon by Escalante in 1776.

Canyonlands National Park - Island in the Sky

A flat-topped mesa with views that stretch to infinity

Canyons of the Ancients National Monument

The densest field of archaeological sites in the country, and a museum built on the three million objects dug up before a reservoir drowned the Dolores valley.

Cape Blanco Lighthouse

The westernmost light in Oregon, kept for decades by two men who spent their whole careers on the cape and, from 1903, by the state's first woman keeper.

Cape Disappointment

The headland at the Columbia's mouth, named for a fur trader's mistake and fortified, lit and manned against the bar below it.

Capitol Reef National Park

Utah's most underrated national park — a 100-mile wrinkle in the Earth

Capulin Volcano National Monument

A cinder cone you can drive to the top of, rising more than a thousand feet from the high plains east of Raton, whose lava broke out of its foot rather than its crater.

Carlin & the Carlin Trend

The small railroad town west of Elko that sits beside the largest gold complex on earth — and, because the gold is invisible, shows you almost none of it.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park

The way into the cave has changed four times: a guano miner's bucket, a wooden staircase, a 750-foot elevator, and now a timed ticket and a switchback trail down the natural entrance.

Carson City

The capital one man platted before there was a territory—where the Comstock's silver became coin at a U.S. Mint and a small sandstone city that has run Nevada ever since

Carson Mansion

The house Eureka's biggest lumberman began in 1884 on the bluff above his own mill, and the story told about why.

Carter County Museum

Montana's first county museum, built in 1936 by a ranch county to keep the dinosaurs its own ground kept giving up.

Casa Grande Ruins

The Huhugam Great House — and the country's first archaeological reserve

Casa Malpais

The Mogollon great house on the lava, and the catacombs sealed back shut

Cascade Springs

Seven million gallons a day welling up through travertine terraces and clear pools

Castle Valley

A stunning valley dominated by the iconic Castleton Tower

Cataldo Mission

The Schitsu'umsh built it, the 1873 reservation line left it outside, and every August 15 they come back.

Cathedral Gorge State Park

A drained ancient lakebed eroded into buff-colored spires and narrow slot "caves" — one of Nevada's first state parks, and the gentle, otherworldly counterweight to the Silver Trails' ghost towns.

Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush

One of the most sacred places of the Wašiw—the Standing Gray Rock, a worn volcano the highway was blasted through and climbers bolted for sport, now closed and quiet again after the Washoe's long fight to protect it

Cedar Breaks National Monument

A 2,000-foot-deep amphitheater of vivid orange and red rock

Celilo Village

The village that stayed on the bluff above the drowned falls, rebuilt half a century late by the government that flooded them, where the salmon season still opens each April.

Central City Opera House

Built by a mining town for itself in 1878, outshone by Tabor within four years, and reopened in 1932 with Lillian Gish.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park

The great houses of Chaco Canyon at the end of thirteen miles of washboard dirt, an International Dark Sky Park in the middle of one of the country's busiest gas fields.

Champoeg

The river-bend meadow where settlers voted for a government in 1843, and where the Willamette took the entire town but one warehouse eighteen years later.

Chavez Ravine

Three Mexican American neighborhoods cleared for public housing that was never built, then traded to a ballclub.

Checkerboard Mesa

A 900-foot dome of Navajo sandstone scored into a natural grid, near Zion's east entrance

Cheyenne Frontier Days

A railroad agent's excursion scheme for a town with no crop to celebrate, which became a six-hour show in 1897 and the Daddy of 'em All.

Chico Hot Springs

A miners' wash pool turned hotel, turned hospital, turned the valley's favorite place to soak.

Chief Joseph's Grave

The Nez Perce cemetery at Nespelem, on the Colville Reservation, where Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt was buried in 1904 and buried again under a historical society's marble shaft in 1905.

Chief Plenty Coups State Park

The log house of the last traditional chief of the Apsáalooke, given in 1928 as a park for Crow and white people together.

Chief Washakie's Grave

The Army buried the Eastern Shoshone leader with full honors in 1900; his gravestone praises his loyalty to whites and leaves the rest out.

Chiricahua National Monument

The Land of Standing-Up Rocks — Cochise and Geronimo's stronghold

Cholla Cactus Garden

Ten acres of teddybear cholla that look soft and are anything but, at the seam between two deserts.

Chollar Mine

A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark

Cisco

A railroad-and-oil ghost town at the east end of UT-128, later a backdrop for "Thelma & Louise"

City of Rocks National Reserve

Two granite spires the emigrants steered by. They look like twins and formed about 2.5 billion years apart.

City of Rocks State Park

Pinnacles of volcanic tuff up to forty feet high standing in the grassland between Deming and Silver City, worn out of an eruption 34.9 million years ago.

Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry

The densest concentration of Jurassic-era dinosaur bones ever found

Coldwater Lake

A lake that did not exist before 8:32 on the morning of May 18, 1980, below the ridge where the geologist David Johnston radioed his last words.

Collier Memorial State Park and Logging Museum

An outdoor museum of a century of logging machinery in the pine woods north of Klamath Falls, given to the state by a lumberman and his banker brother.

Colorado Chautauqua

A summer school for Texas teachers that Boulder built in under eight weeks in 1898, still running at the foot of the Flatirons.

Colorado Gators Reptile Park

A tilapia farm on an 87-degree geothermal well that bought a hundred baby alligators in 1987 to eat the fish guts, and became a refuge for unwanted reptiles.

Colorado National Monument

A homemade road of fifty-four switchbacks, then the CCC's Rim Rock Drive, nineteen years in the building and finished in 1950.

Colorado State Capitol

A capitol of Colorado granite, marble, onyx and gold, with three different steps claiming to stand exactly a mile high.

Colorado Street Bridge

Beaux-Arts concrete arches curving 150 feet above the Arroyo Seco, opened in 1913 and later a link in Route 66.

Columbia State Historic Park

The Gem of the Southern Mines, still open for business on a car-free Gold Rush main street.

Connor Battlefield State Historic Site

In 1865 General Connor's troops attacked Black Bear's Arapaho village here while many of its men were away; women and children died with the warriors.

Conrad Mansion

Kalispell's founder built it in 1895; in 1974 the town's voters said no to owning it.

Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park

Sweeping dunes of coral-colored sand framed by red cliffs

Corona Arch Trail

A massive arch you can hike to without a national park fee

Cove Fort

A beautifully restored 1867 pioneer fort at the crossroads of two interstates

Crater Lake Lodge

A hotel on the caldera rim that opened in 1915 with tar paper on its walls, was never quite finished, came close to demolition, and is now mostly new behind its old face.

Craters of the Moon National Monument

A geologist coined the name in 1923. A Boise taxidermist carried his dog across the lava and sold the place to a president.

Crazy Mountains

Awaxaawippíia, the Apsáalooke's holiest mountains, where young Plenty Coups saw the end of the buffalo.

Crescent City Harbor

The harbor the Pacific aims its tsunamis at, rebuilt after 2011 to ride the next one out.

Crystal Geyser

A cold-water geyser that erupts from an abandoned oil well

CSKT Bison Range

The herd the tribes saved, the government forced them to sell, and the range they finally got back.

Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad

A narrow-gauge steam railroad from Chama over 10,015-foot Cumbres Pass to Antonito, kept narrow because nobody ever thought it worth converting.

Cunningham Cabin

An 1888 dog-trot homestead cabin where a posse shot two men in 1893, and the valley decided not to talk about it.

Cypress Tree Tunnel and Coast Station KPH

A radio company's driveway that grew into a tunnel, leading to the coast station that kept Morse code on the air.

Daly Mansion

A copper king's summer farm, finished by his widow after his death and boarded up for forty-six years after hers.

Dantes View

A 5,475-foot balcony on the Black Mountains crest with Badwater a vertical mile below.

Dead Horse Point State Park

A 2,000-foot sheer drop overlooking the Colorado River

Deception Pass

A tide race between Whidbey and Fidalgo islands that fooled George Vancouver, and the 1935 bridge that finally tied Whidbey to the mainland.

Decision Point

The rise where Lewis and Clark spent ten days in 1805 deciding which river was the Missouri, against nearly every man in the party.

Deer Medicine Rocks

The sandstone outcrop on Rosebud Creek that carries Sitting Bull's vision of 1876: soldiers falling into the camp.

Deer Valley

A ski-only luxury resort above Park City, now in the middle of the largest expansion in U.S. ski history.

Depoe Bay

A six-acre harbor reached through a crack in the basalt, on land allotted in 1894 to a Tututni man the agency knew as Depot Charley.

Devil's Kitchen

A pocket of red-rock hoodoos high in the green Wasatch — a "little Bryce Canyon"

Devils Postpile National Monument

A wall of hexagonal basalt columns with a glacier-polished top, and a 101-foot waterfall downstream.

Devils Tower National Monument

A plug of gray-green igneous rock cooled into columns 40 million years ago, first climbed on a stake ladder in 1893, where a parachutist was stranded for six days in 1941.

DeVoto Memorial Cedar Grove

Thousand-year-old cedars on the Lochsa headwaters, where the editor of Lewis and Clark's journals asked to be scattered.

Dewey Bridge

All that remains of Utah's longest suspension bridge — bare towers and cables over the Colorado River

Dinosaur Hill

Where a Chicago museum's crew dug two-thirds of a sauropod in 1901, a few miles from the hill where they had found the first Brachiosaurus the summer before.

Dinosaur National Monument

A wall of 1,500 dinosaur bones still embedded in the rock where they were found

Dinosaur Ridge

A hogback near Morrison with the bones of 1877 on one flank and the footprints a road crew blasted open in 1937 on the other.

Doble

Three men with money reopened this mine and all three failed. The town is named after the second one.

Domínguez Rancho Adobe

The first Spanish land grant in California contained the whole harbor, and in 1846 fifty Californio lancers turned back three hundred Marines on it.

Donner Memorial State Park

Where the Donner Party spent the winter of 1846, marked by cabin stone and a monument built to a remembered snow depth.

Donner Summit Tunnels

Granite bored by hand at fourteen inches a day, by Chinese crews the country spent a century forgetting.

Drum Barracks

The Union Army built its Southern California headquarters in a county that had voted against Lincoln two to one, and stabled the Army camels here.

Drumheller Channels

A maze of flood-cut buttes and basins south of Potholes Reservoir, filled with lakes the irrigation project never meant to make, and the cranes that came for them.

Dry Falls Vista House

The viewpoint a Coulee City grocer talked the state into in 1925, with a stone Vista House on the rim from 1928 and a glass-walled interpretive center from 1966.

Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad

Steam to Silverton up the Animas since 1882, and the coal-fired locomotive cinder that federal investigators blamed for the 416 Fire of 2018.

Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center

The only longhouse in Seattle, built by the people the city grew up on top of, on land they bought back themselves.

Eagle Butte Mine Overlook

A working Powder River Basin coal mine that still takes visitors, in the basin that mines close to forty percent of the nation's coal.

Earthquake Trail

A short loop along the San Andreas, where a broken fence shows how far Point Reyes moved in under a minute in 1906.

Ebey's Landing

A bluff trail above the beach where, in August 1857, a Kake raiding party came ashore to answer the shelling of their camp at Port Gamble the year before.

Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum

An Ancestral Puebloan ruin you can climb down into

El Malpais National Monument

The badlands south of Grants: lava 3,900 years old from McCartys Crater, a tube system at least seventeen miles long, and an old trail across four lava flows between Zuni and Acoma.

El Morro National Monument

A sandstone headland with a pool at its foot, where Puebloan people, Spanish governors and American soldiers all left their marks, until carving became illegal in 1906.

El Santuario de Chimayó

A small adobe shrine on the High Road to Taos, built around 1816 over earth that pilgrims still carry away in hope of healing.

Elko

The railroad built it, cattle made it, and gold keeps it — the working capital of northeast Nevada, a frontier cow town that never got around to becoming a relic.

Ely

The copper town and crossroads at the east end of the loneliest road — home of the Ghost Train and the gateway to Great Basin

Emerald Bay State Park

A glacial fjord on Tahoe's west shore with the lake's only island and a Scandinavian house at the water.

Emigration Canyon

The final stretch of trail the Mormon pioneers took into the valley

Empire Mine State Historic Park

The oldest, deepest, richest hard-rock gold mine in California, with 367 miles of flooded tunnels underneath.

English Camp

Twelve years of a British garrison on a Coast Salish shell midden, with a formal garden, a blockhouse that outlived the empire's claim, and a cemetery on the hill.

Ensign Peak

A short hike to the spot where Brigham Young surveyed the valley

Ephraim

Utah's Little Denmark and the home of Snow College

Ephraim Co-op

The 1871 cooperative store that outlived the economy it was built to replace

Escalante

The town that gave Grand Staircase-Escalante its name

Escalante Interagency Visitor Center

Your essential stop before heading into the backcountry

Escalante Petrified Forest State Park

Walk among 150-million-year-old stone trees

Eureka

The Pittsburgh of the West, reborn — the best-preserved town on the loneliest road, with an 1880 opera house and a working 1879 courthouse

Expedition Island

Where John Wesley Powell's 1871 survey left for the canyons of the Green and Colorado; where his 1869 trip started has never been proven.

Experimental Breeder Reactor I

The reactor that lit four bulbs in 1951 also suffered the first accidental breeder meltdown, and two engines for a nuclear bomber sit outside.

Extraterrestrial Highway

Ninety-eight lonely miles of State Route 375 past the back roads to Area 51 — with the Little A'Le'Inn in Rachel, the legend of the Black Mailbox, and some of the darkest skies in the country.

Factory Butte

A moonscape monolith rising from Mancos Shale badlands west of Hanksville.

Fairview

The north gate of the Heritage Highway, home to a near-complete Ice Age mammoth

Fantasy Canyon

Impossibly shaped rock formations that look like alien sculptures

Farragut State Park

The Navy built its second-largest boot camp 375 miles from the ocean, and still tests submarines on the lake.

Fisher Towers

Towering dark red pinnacles rising 900 feet from the desert floor

Fishers Peak State Park

The flat-topped landmark over Trinidad and Raton Pass, a trophy-hunting ranch until 2019 and Colorado's second-largest state park since 2020, with a summit trail since 2023.

Fishlake National Forest

Home to Pando — the largest living organism on Earth

Flagstaff

The ponderosa town where they found Pluto and saved the dark

Flaming Gorge Dam

A 502-foot concrete dam with a free guided tour inside

Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area

A turquoise reservoir carved into blazing red canyon walls

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument

Redwood stumps buried by a volcanic mudflow 34 million years ago, sold off by the piece for a century, and saved in 1969 by scientists ready to lie down in front of bulldozers.

Forrest Gump Point

The exact spot where Forrest stopped running

Fort Apache Historic Park

The Army fort that became a boarding school — and came back to the Apache

Fort Assinniboine

The brick border post whose Buffalo Soldiers deported the Cree in 1896, and whose land became the Cree's reservation twenty years later.

Fort Belknap Agency

The agency on the Milk River whose water fight gave the West its founding rule of tribal water rights in 1908.

Fort Caspar Museum

The crossing before the fort: the Mormon ferry of 1847 and Guinard's toll bridge of 1859, rebuilt beside the 1936 log station.

Fort Clatsop

The log post the Corps of Discovery named for its neighbors, and left to the Clatsop headman Coboway five days after stealing one of his people's canoes.

Fort Fizzle

A log barricade built to stop the Nimiipuu in 1877. They climbed the ridge behind it and walked around.

Fort Fred Steele State Historic Site

A fort built in 1868 to guard the Union Pacific's North Platte crossing, which became the collecting yard for railroad ties floated down the river.

Fort Keogh

Nelson Miles's post at the mouth of the Tongue, built after the Little Bighorn, a remount depot by 1909 and a range lab since 1924.

Fort Klamath

The army post that reached the Wood River Valley four years before Klamath Falls existed, and the treaty signed near it that put three peoples on one reservation.

Fort Laramie National Historic Site

Old Bedlam, the officers' quarters of 1849, survived the auction that scattered the rest of the post; an 1875 Army bridge still crosses the river.

Fort Missoula

An 1877 Army post that held Italian seamen and Japanese immigrant men behind its fence in World War II.

Fort Owen

A trader bought a failed mission for $250, walled it in adobe, and lost it all at a sheriff's sale.

Fort Peck Theatre

A movie house the Corps of Engineers threw up in nine months for the dam crews, meant to come down when the dam was done.

Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site

A Bozeman Trail fort whose wood trains were attacked for two years, and the wagon-box corral where its woodcutters held out behind new breech-loaders in 1867.

Fort Rock

A ring of volcanic rock standing alone on a dry lakebed, born when rising magma hit water and later carved by the waves of a lake that surrounded it as an island.

Fort Shaw Indian School

An Army post turned boarding school, whose Native girls went to the 1904 World's Fair as an exhibit and came home champions.

Fort Simcoe

Mool-Mool, the bubbling springs on a Yakama trail, where the Army built a fort in 1856 and the government ran a boarding school for Yakama children for sixty years.

Fort Spokane

An army post set down in 1880 across the river from the line President Hayes drew for the Spokane Reservation the next winter, and emptied for the war with Spain in 1898.

Fort Union National Monument

Three forts in one prairie valley where the two branches of the Santa Fe Trail met: a log post, a star-shaped earthwork, and an adobe supply town that fed the army's wars.

Fort Vancouver Village

The workers' town outside the Hudson's Bay Company stockade, where Hawaiian, Iroquois, French-Canadian, Scots and Native families lived side by side.

Fossil Butte National Monument

The floor of a 52-million-year-old lake, packed with whole fish, the oldest complete bats and the only complete freshwater stingrays.

Founders Grove

A grove named for three men who saved redwoods and preached race science, and the trailside sign that now says both.

Fremont Indian State Park

The largest known Fremont Indian village ever discovered

Fremont Street

Glitter Gulch — the neon canyon where Las Vegas actually began

Frenchtown Historic Site

Where the Walla Walla leader Peopeomoxmox, who had come to the Oregon volunteers under a white flag, was killed as their hostage on December 7, 1855.

Fruita Historic District

A pioneer orchard oasis in the red-rock heart of Capitol Reef.

Fuller Lodge

The upright-log dining hall of a boys' ranch school, which fed and housed the Manhattan Project after the Army bought the school in 1942.

Furnace Creek

The valley hub, the hottest air temperature ever officially recorded, and the Timbisha village that was here first.

Galena Summit Overlook

The Salmon River's first miles, seen from an overlook named for the couple who helped keep a mine out of the view.

Garden of the Gods

Named in 1859 by a surveyor who wanted no beer garden there, and given to the city in 1909 on the condition it stay free, dry and unbuilt.

Genoa

Nevada's oldest town—a California Trail trading post and Carson Valley ranch country that came eight years before the silver and quietly outlasted it

Georgetown Loop Railroad

Scrapped in 1939 for $450, rebuilt a century after it first opened, and running again over the bridge that crosses its own track.

Ghost Ranch

Red, yellow and white cliffs above the Piedra Lumbre basin, where Georgia O'Keeffe bought seven acres in 1940 and paleontologists found a hillside full of dinosaurs in 1947.

Giant Springs State Park

The spring William Clark called the largest he ever saw, and the 201-foot river a fifth-grade class got into the record books.

Gifford Homestead

A pioneer homestead famous for its fresh-baked pies

Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument

Rooms built into five caves above a Gila side canyon in the late 1270s and lived in for about a generation, at the end of forty-four winding miles of mountain road from Silver City.

Gilgal Sculpture Garden

A surreal and eccentric sculpture garden hidden in a residential neighborhood

Ginkgo Petrified Forest

A forest of stone logs that never grew together, found by a music teacher and his students in 1932 and left where it lay under cages the CCC built.

Glass Beach

Sixty years of Fort Bragg's garbage, ground down by the surf into a beach its visitors have nearly picked clean.

Glenbrook & Spooner Summit

Lake Tahoe's east shore, where the basin was logged nearly clean to timber the Comstock—the forest that paid for the silver, and the century it has spent growing back

Glenwood Canyon

Interstate 70 threaded through on viaducts in 1992, buried by debris flows off a burn scar in 2021, with Hanging Lake on a permit above it.

Glines Canyon Spillway Overlook

A viewpoint built on the spillway of a 210-foot dam that is no longer there, above a valley that was a reservoir for most of a century.

Goat Rock and the Russian River Mouth

A headland blasted for a jetty that never kept the river open, at the mouth where harbor seals haul out.

Goblin Valley State Park

Thousands of mushroom-shaped rock formations in a Martian landscape

Goffs

A near-ghost on the pre-1931 Route 66 alignment, keeper of a 1914 desert schoolhouse and a WWII Army camp.

Gold Bluffs Beach and Fern Canyon

A beach that set off a gold stampede in 1850, and the fern-walled slot a creek has cut through the same bluffs.

Golden Spike National Historical Park

Where East met West — the spot that connected America by rail

Goldfield

Once the largest city in Nevada, now a few hundred souls — the purest boom-and-bust in the West, with a castle courthouse still in use, a grand hotel dark since the war, and a desert full of upended cars.

Goosenecks State Park

A 1,000-foot-deep river canyon with impossibly tight meanders

Graber Olive House

The oldest business in Ontario, a cannery of five hundred brine vats — shut since the pandemic and in foreclosure.

Grafton Ghost Town

A photogenic ghost town used in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Grand Canyon (South Rim)

A mile down through two billion years — and eleven nations' ground

Grand Canyon Caverns

The largest dry cavern in the country, 210 feet under Route 66 — a Cold War fallout shelter, the deepest hotel room in America, and a Hualapai burial place the tourists once mistook for a sideshow.

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Hot water stained and softened the rock the river carved; Congress paid Thomas Moran $10,000 for painting it and gave the park nothing.

Grand Coulee Dam

An idea a newspaper buried on page seven in 1918, built as a Depression jobs program by twelve thousand workers, seventy-two of whom died on it.

Grand Mesa

An old valley floor turned into a mountaintop by lava, holding more than three hundred lakes, with a road up its western cliffs built by veterans of the CCC.

Grand Prismatic Spring

The rings of color are living microbial mats, and a microbe from a smaller spring nearby made DNA copying, and the COVID test, possible.

Grandstaff Canyon

A shaded creek-bottom walk to Morning Glory, the sixth-longest natural rock span in the country

Granite Mountain/Speculator Mine Memorial

An overlook above the shaft where the 1917 fire began, and the letters some of the trapped men wrote while they waited.

Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site

A Métis trader's 1862 house, a cattle king's headquarters, and a grandson who threw nothing away.

Great Basin National Park

Nevada's only national park — caves below, the oldest trees on earth above, the darkest skies overhead

Great Hunt Panel

Nine Mile Canyon's most famous petroglyph — the rare rock art panel people feel they can read.

Great Plains Dinosaur Museum

Home of Leonardo, the duckbill that kept its skin for seventy-seven million years, found in the breaks north of Malta in 2000.

Great Salt Lake

The largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve

Saved from gold miners and a cement plant by women's clubs in 1932, and made a national park in 2004 to keep the valley's groundwater from being piped away.

Green River

A small desert town famous for its melons and river adventures

Grimes Point

Hundreds of desert-varnished boulders carved over eight thousand years — the Great Basin's most accessible rock art

Gros Ventre Slide

The north face of Sheep Mountain fell into the river in 1925; the dam it made held two years, then emptied onto the town of Kelly.

Grosvenor Arch

A massive double arch named for the National Geographic Society president

Gunnison

Sanpete's southern hub, home to Utah's oldest operating theater

Hackberry General Store

Looks like a junkyard, is a shrine — the 1934 store an artist brought back from the dead, and the Route 66 stop that inspired Fillmore in Cars.

Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument

Idaho's state fossil is closer to a zebra than a horse, and nearly the whole herd is in a museum in Washington.

Hanksville

The town where Earth ends and Mars begins

Harada House

The 1884 cottage a Japanese American family bought in their children's names, and kept in court.

Hardware Ranch Wildlife Management Area

A winter elk feeding ground where you can take a sleigh ride among hundreds of elk

Harriman State Park

The Harrimans would give Idaho their ranch only when Idaho had a parks department fit to run it. The state built one.

Havre Beneath the Streets

Basement storefronts under a railroad town that burned twice in one January day in 1904, furnished now as a tour.

Haystack Rock

A 235-foot sea stack made of lava that ran down the Columbia from the far side of the state, now a nesting rock for tufted puffins.

Heard Museum

The Native Southwest, told in the first person

Heart Mountain Interpretive Center

The incarcerated cleared and watered the land; when the camp closed it went to veterans to homestead, and the barracks sold for a dollar each.

Heart of the Monster

Where the Nimiipuu say their story begins: Coyote, a monster, and the heart he tore loose, still on the Clearwater's bank.

Heaven's Gate Lookout

A staffed fire lookout at 8,429 feet on the rim of North America's deepest river gorge, nearly reachable by car.

Heber Valley Railroad

A vintage steam train ride through a stunning mountain valley

Hells Backbone Grill

A farm-to-table pioneer in the middle of nowhere

Hells Backbone Road

A 38-mile gravel detour with a 1,500-foot drop on either side

Henrieville

A blink-and-you-will-miss-it ranching hamlet

Henry Mountains

The last range on the map — and America's wildest bison herd.

Hickison Petroglyphs

Western Shoshone rock art cut into soft white tuff at a 6,500-foot summit — the easiest rock art to meet on the loneliest road

Hickman Bridge Trail

A natural stone bridge framing Capitol Reefs layered cliffs

Hill Aerospace Museum

Over 90 military aircraft displayed indoors and on the tarmac

Historic St. Mary's Mission

The mission the Salish asked for, abandoned, rebuilt, and closed again the year the Salish were made to leave.

Hoh Rain Forest

Twelve to fourteen feet of rain a year, spruce standing in rows on the logs that nursed them, and the elk Theodore Roosevelt set the first park lands aside for.

Holbrook

A Santa Fe railroad town once too tough for women and churches, now the seat of Navajo County, gateway to the Petrified Forest, and home to the concrete teepees of the Wigwam Motel.

Hole N the Rock

A 5,000-square-foot home carved inside a massive sandstone boulder

Holzwarth Historic Site

A Denver saloon keeper put out of business by prohibition, a homestead in the Kawuneeche Valley, and a dude ranch that ran from 1919 to 1973.

Homestead Crater

A hidden geothermal spring inside a 55-foot limestone dome

Hoover Dam

The 726-foot Depression-era colossus that tamed the Colorado and made Las Vegas possible

Hot Springs State Park

Wyoming's first state park: a thousand feet of banded travertine along the Bighorn, a 1916 swinging bridge, and a small bison herd on the hill.

Hotel de Paris

A French cook's hotel in a silver town, kept for twenty-five years by a man whose name turned out not to be his own.

Hungry Horse Dam

Named for two freight horses that nearly starved in the snow, and home to the tallest morning-glory spillway in the world.

Hurricane Canal Trail

The hand-dug canal that built Hurricane, now a walking trail blasted into the Virgin River gorge

Hyrum State Park

A family-friendly reservoir at the mouth of Blacksmith Fork Canyon

Idaho State Capitol

Walls hauled from the prison quarry, heat pumped from 3,000 feet down, and its newest rooms built underground.

Independence Pass

Crossed by prospectors on the Fourth of July 1879, opened as a toll road for the Aspen rush in 1881, and shut by snow half of every year since.

Independence Rock State Historic Site

A granite whaleback named before the wagons came, by trappers in 1824 or Sublette in 1830, and polished by wind until it took names easily.

International Peace Gardens

A hidden garden where 28 countries are represented in miniature

International UFO Museum and Research Center

A 1930s movie theater on Roswell's Main Street turned into a museum by two men who had been part of the 1947 story, one of them the officer who announced the flying disc.

Jackpot

A casino town made by an Idaho law, a mile inside the Nevada line, that still keeps Idaho's clock.

Jacksonville and the Britt Gardens

The gold camp a Swiss photographer walked into in 1852 pulling his camera on a cart, and the hillside where his 1862 sequoia now shades a summer music festival.

Jarbidge

The end of the road, twice over — Nevada's most isolated town, deep in a canyon on the Idaho line, where the West's last gold rush and its last stagecoach robbery both played out.

Jardine Juniper

One of the oldest living trees in the world at over 1,500 years old

Jemez Historic Site

The stone walls of a 1620s mission church standing among the ruins of Gisewa, a Jemez village named for the hot springs beside it.

Jerome

The billion-dollar copper camp clinging to Cleopatra Hill — now the largest ghost town in America

John Wesley Powell River History Museum

The only U.S. museum devoted to river history, on the bank of the Green River.

Jordanelle State Park

A sapphire reservoir nestled between the Wasatch and Uinta mountains

Joseph and the Bronze Foundries

A ranch town under the Wallowas that became a bronze-casting center after local sculptors talked a resident into opening a foundry in 1982, with seven monumental bronzes now on Main Street.

Joshua Tree National Park

Where the high Mojave meets the low Colorado, among monzogranite piles and a yucca that is not a tree.

Jug Handle Ecological Staircase

Five steps up from the beach, each about a hundred thousand years older than the last, ending in a forest of century-old trees no taller than a person.

Julesburg

The town that moved four times: a trading post, a stage stop burned in 1865, the wickedest end-of-track town on the Union Pacific, and finally Denver Junction renamed.

Kaiser Steel Mill Site

The mill that made Fontana a steel town, gave the country Kaiser Permanente, and drew a color line at Base Line Road.

Kam Wah Chung

A stone store in John Day where a Chinese herbalist practiced for sixty years and died leaving $23,000 in patients' checks he had never cashed.

Kamas

A ranching town and gateway to the Uinta Mountains

Kanab

Little Hollywood — where hundreds of Western movies were filmed

Kayenta

Tó Dínéeshzheeʼ — Monument Valley's gateway town and keeper of the Code Talkers' story.

Keller Peak Fire Lookout

For ninety-eight years it watched this forest for smoke. In September 2024 a fire took it, and the steel frame is what is left.

Kelso Depot

A grand 1920s Mission Revival rail depot standing alone in the deep Mojave, now the preserve's visitor center.

Kelso Dunes

The Mojave's largest dune field, and one of the few places on Earth where the sand booms underfoot.

Kingman

The working hub of Route 66 in Arizona — a railroad town named for a surveyor, Andy Devine's hometown, and the last real stop before the road's two wildest endings.

Kirkham Hot Springs

Hot water pours off a ledge into pools at the edge of the South Fork Payette, a staircase down from the highway.

Kiva Koffeehouse

A hand-built cliffside coffee shop with canyon views

Kodachrome Basin State Park

A valley of 67 stone chimneys rising from the desert floor

Kolob Canyons

The quiet, uncrowded back door to Zion National Park

Kootenai Falls

The Kootenai people's sacred falls, kept running free by a nine-year fight against a dam.

Korean Friendship Bell

Seventeen tons of bronze given by Korea for the American bicentennial, on the bluff above the harbor its troops shipped out from.

Kule Loklo

A Coast Miwok village built in the 1970s to honour a people its builders were told had died out. They had not.

Ladder Creek Falls and Gardens

A waterfall behind a powerhouse that Seattle's light superintendent strung with colored lights and planted as an exotic garden, to sell the city on its dams.

Lagoon Amusement Park

A beloved family amusement park operating since 1886

Lake Arrowhead Village

A reservoir that lost in court and became a resort — and the 1920s village that made its name was burned down on purpose.

Lake Gregory

A New Deal dam built by a Redlands orange grower, for the opposite reason to every other lake on this mountain.

Lake Lenore Caves

Shallow shelters in a coulee wall that people used for thousands of years, where the archaeologists who arrived in 1958 found that collectors had dug them over first.

Lake McDonald Lodge

A hunting lodge built with its front door on the lake, because in 1914 its guests arrived by boat.

Lake Mead National Recreation Area

The largest reservoir in the country — and its most legible drought gauge

Lamoille Canyon & the Ruby Mountains

The great exception to Nevada's sagebrush monotony — a glacier-carved canyon and a wall of eleven-thousand-foot granite peaks an hour southeast of Elko, fairly called the state's Alps.

Las Vegas Strip

Four and a quarter miles of engineered spectacle — the most famous street in America (and it isn't in Las Vegas)

Lava Hot Springs

The pools belong to the state because the springs left the Fort Hall Reservation and Congress handed them to Idaho in 1902.

Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery

The world's largest salmon hatchery when it opened in 1940, built to make up for the runs Grand Coulee Dam cut off, on the fishery the Wenatchi were promised.

Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge

Bitterroot wetlands bought with duck stamps and named for the senator who signed off on refuges across the country.

Legend Rock State Petroglyph Site

Ten thousand years of images pecked into a sandstone cliff, most by the ancestors of the Eastern Shoshone, now behind a gate after vandalism.

Lehi Roller Mills

The flour mill from the movie Footloose

Lemhi Pass

Lewis walked up a Shoshone road looking for the Pacific and saw only more mountains.

Leonis Adobe

Miguel Leonis left his estate to relatives in France and called Espíritu Chijulla his housekeeper; she spent sixteen years proving in court that she was his wife.

Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park

A limestone cave the Civilian Conservation Corps spent six years making walkable, by the steps, lights and tunnel visitors still use.

Libby

A timber town where the mine's dust killed hundreds, and the first place the EPA ever declared a public health emergency.

Liberty Park

Salt Lake Citys beloved 80-acre urban park since 1882

Lincoln Historic Site

One street of adobe in the Bonito valley kept much as it was in the 1870s, where the Lincoln County War was fought over who would supply Fort Stanton and the Mescalero agency.

Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument

A battlefield you can read by its stones: white marble where soldiers fell since 1890, red granite where warriors fell since 1999.

Living Desert Zoo and Gardens State Park

A zoo and garden of the Chihuahuan Desert on the Ocotillo Hills above Carlsbad, whose animals are injured or orphaned wildlife that cannot go back to the wild.

Logan

A vibrant college town tucked into a stunning mountain valley

Logan Canyon

A winding National Scenic Byway through limestone cliffs and alpine forest

Logan Pass

The pass a road nearly reached by fifteen switchbacks, and reached instead by one.

Los Encinos State Historic Park

A spring that never stopped running, the village it fed for thousands of years, and the rancho that took the ground away.

Lost City Museum

The Ancestral Puebloan metropolis Lake Mead drowned — and the museum that saved what it could

Lower Calf Creek Falls

A 126-foot waterfall hidden in a desert canyon

Ludlow Tent Colony Site

The coal miners' union bought the ground, raised a granite monument over the pit in 1918, and restored it after someone knocked the heads off its figures in 2003.

Madison Buffalo Jump State Park

A limestone cliff where people drove bison over the edge for two thousand years, until horses made it unnecessary.

Mai Wah Museum

Two brick buildings left from Butte's Chinatown, and a store whose goods came home after seventy years away.

Makah Cultural and Research Center

The tribe's own museum at the end of the road, built around the whale hunt and the treaty that is the only one the United States ever signed naming a right to whale.

Makoshika State Park

Montana's largest state park, a badland on the edge of Glendive where the rock shows the end of the age of dinosaurs.

Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park

A canyon washed out of a mountain by water cannon, and the lawsuit that ended hydraulic mining.

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

A lake-and-marsh refuge set aside for its birds in 1908 that had to buy a river's water to keep them, and now fights the carp that have eaten away its marshes.

Mammoth Hot Springs

A hill of travertine still being built, two tons a day, its springs going dry in one place and breaking out in another.

Manitou Cliff Dwellings

A pueblo from McElmo Canyon, dismantled, shipped across the Rockies by rail and set in cement into a dynamited overhang as cliff dwellings it never was.

Mann Gulch

Thirteen markers on a grass slope above the Missouri, where a fire outran a crew of smokejumpers in 1949.

Manti

Sanpete's first settlement, crowned by an 1888 oolite temple

Manti Temple

A striking pioneer-era temple crowning a hilltop above the Sanpete Valley

Manti-La Sal National Forest

Alpine peaks rising above red rock desert

Many Glacier Hotel

The Great Northern's grandest Swiss chalet, which a cabinet secretary once said only a match could fix.

Manzanar National Historic Site

A concentration camp on twice-taken ground, where the United States imprisoned more than eleven thousand of its own.

March Field Air Museum

A century of the same field, still working — the museum parked outside the fence of a base that has flown since 1918.

Maroon Bells

Two fourteeners of crumbling red mudstone, called the Deadly Bells since eight people died on them in 1965, and reachable in summer only by reservation.

Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park

The tailrace at Coloma where a carpenter found gold in January 1848 and the world came running.

Massacre Rocks State Park

Named for emigrant deaths that happened somewhere else, five months before a massacre that was called a battle.

Mayfield

Gateway to Twelve Mile Canyon and the Skyline Drive high country

McCall Smokejumper Base

Where conscientious objectors in the Second World War parachuted onto forest fires, and were shunned in camp for it.

McConkie Ranch Petroglyphs

Massive Fremont-era rock art panels on private ranch land open to visitors

McLoughlin House

The retirement house of the Hudson's Bay man who supplied the Oregon Trail's starving arrivals, saved from a paper mill's lot in 1909 and hauled up the bluff to a park he had given the town.

Medicine Bow Peak

The Snowy Range's quartzite high point, where United Air Lines Flight 409 struck the east face in 1955 and killed all sixty-six aboard.

Medicine Rocks State Park

Sandstone towers worn full of holes, holy ground to the Lakota and Cheyenne and a stone register of everyone who came after.

Menan Buttes

Two volcanoes built where lava ran into the Snake River, and one of them open to walk around the rim.

Mentryville and Pico Canyon

A company town in a canyon, and a mile and a half further up the road, the well that started the California oil industry.

Mesa Falls

The inn went up with a dam in mind. The dam never came, and the Henrys Fork still drops 114 feet untouched.

Mesa Verde National Park

A park won by Colorado clubwomen who then fell out over who should run it, drawn first around the wrong ground, and squared with the Weeminuche Utes only in 1911.

Mesilla Plaza

A plaza laid out in 1848 by people who meant to stay in Mexico, American six years later, a stage stop and Civil War headquarters, and scene of a deadly political riot in 1871.

Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes

Fourteen square miles of dunes near Stovepipe Wells, and the easiest sand in the park to reach.

Metropolis

A planned farm city with a brick hotel and street lights, undone by a lawsuit from farmers at the far end of the same river.

Mexican Hat Rock

A perfectly balanced sombrero-shaped rock formation

Middle Village–Station Camp

A Chinook trading town on the north shore of the Columbia's mouth, where the ground turned up more copper, glass beads and Chinese coins than tools.

Midway

A Swiss-inspired village with a geothermal crater you can snorkel in

Miles City Bucking Horse Sale

A sale of bucking stock that began with thirty-five unwanted horses in 1950 and became eastern Montana's biggest weekend.

Minidoka National Historic Site

The prisoners built a board for the names of their sons in the Army. When the camp was given away as farms, the board was lost.

Minnetonka Cave

Found by a grouse hunter, named first for a porcupine and then in a language from the far side of the Rockies. Five kinds of bats winter inside.

Mirror Lake

A pristine alpine lake reflecting the Uinta peaks like glass

Mission San Fernando Rey de España

The seventeenth Alta California mission, founded at the Tataviam village of Achoicominga, with the largest adobe building in the state standing beside it.

Mission San Gabriel Arcangel

The fourth Alta California mission, built on Tongva land with Tongva labor, rebuilt after arson and now telling that story straight.

Mission San Xavier del Bac

The White Dove of the Desert — the finest Spanish Baroque church in the country

Missoula Smokejumper Visitor Center

The base of the crews descended from the first two men ever to parachute onto a forest fire.

Missouri Headwaters State Park

Where the expedition named three rivers, and where the trappers who came back after it learned whose country it was.

Moab

The adventure capital of the American Southwest

Moki Dugway

A heart-pounding series of switchbacks carved into a cliff face

Mono Lake

A saline lake older than most of the Sierra, with tufa towers and a water fight it eventually won.

Montana State Capitol

A copper-domed capitol won in a copper kings' election, with a Russell painting that put the Salish at the center.

Montezuma Castle

The railroad's turreted resort at the Las Vegas hot springs, burned twice in its first years, empty for most of a century, and now home to an international school.

Montezuma Castle

A five-story Sinagua cliff dwelling, misnamed for an emperor who was never here

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

The most iconic Western landscape on Earth

Mormon Row Historic District

A Latter-day Saint farm village on Antelope Flats, its ditches still running and the Moulton barns still standing against the Tetons.

Moss Mansion

A Billings banker's red sandstone house by the architect of the Plaza, kept as it was by the daughter who never left.

Mossy Cave Trail

A hidden waterfall and ice cave just off the highway

Mount Baldy

Dzil Ligai Si'an, the sacred White Mountain, and the summit you stop short of

Mount Blue Sky

Rosalie for a painter, Evans for a governor, and since 2023 a name the Cheyenne and Arapaho asked for, at the top of North America's highest paved road.

Mount Carmel Junction

The crossroads where the road to Zion meets the highway to Bryce

Mount Charleston & the Spring Mountains

A nearly 12,000-foot sky island 35 miles from the Strip — alpine forest above the Mojave

Mount Nebo

At 11,928 feet, the highest and southernmost peak in the Wasatch Range

Mount Pleasant

A National Register Main Street and Utah's oldest boarding school

Mount Rubidoux

The mountain all of Riverside walks — and the half-acre at the summit the city sold rather than go to court.

Mount Whitney

At 14,505 feet, the highest summit in the contiguous United States, eighty miles from the lowest point.

Muir Beach Overlook

A cliff edge on Highway 1, and the concrete dugouts where two-man crews watched the sea after Pearl Harbor.

Muir Woods National Monument

A redwood canyon saved from a reservoir by a gift, and named for a man who had been there once.

Multnomah Falls

A 620-foot double waterfall whose 1925 stone lodge survived because firefighters kept it soaked while the forest burned around it in September 2017.

Murie Ranch

The porch where the Wilderness Act was argued into being; Olaus Murie died a year before it passed, and Mardy kept going for forty more.

Museum of the Mountain Man

Six fur-trade rendezvous met near here on the Green; the only artist who ever saw one, Alfred Jacob Miller, came in 1837.

Museum of the Plains Indian

A federal museum on the Blackfeet Reservation whose walls were painted by a Blackfeet muralist in its first year.

Museum of the Rockies

The bronze T. rex on the lawn is a cast of the one that went to Washington.

Names Hill State Historic Site

The Sublette Cutoff's register cliff above the Green River crossing, where the most famous name, Jim Bridger's, is probably not his.

National Elk Refuge

Stephen Leek's photographs of starving elk built this winter refuge in 1912; a century of hay feeding is now its hardest question.

National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center

A hilltop museum that Baker City built to revive its economy, above a mile of wagon ruts and the first view the emigrants had of the valley ahead.

National Oregon/California Trail Center

Emigrants came down off Big Hill and camped in the clover here. Brigham Young renamed the town; the trail center brings the camp back in costume.

Natural Bridges National Monument

Three massive natural bridges carved by ancient streams

Natural History Museum of Utah

A world-class museum built into the foothills above Salt Lake City

Nebo Loop Summit

The byway's 9,300-foot high point, with Utah Valley spread out below

Needles

Route 66's Colorado River gateway into California, anchored by El Garces, the Harvey House that Mojave hands built.

Nephi

A quiet ranching town at the foot of Mount Nebo

Nevada City

Gaslamps, brick storefronts, and the Nisenan who are still fighting to be recognized on their own ground.

Newspaper Rock State Historical Monument

One of the largest known panels of ancient petroglyphs in the Southwest

Nine Mile Canyon

The longest art gallery in the world — thousands of ancient rock art panels

Ninemile Remount Depot

The Forest Service's mule ranch, built because the fires of 1929 ran out of packers.

Norris Geyser Basin

Yellowstone's hottest and most changeable basin, home to Steamboat, the world's tallest active geyser, which woke in 2018 after a long quiet.

Northrup Canyon

A side canyon of the Grand Coulee with a forest in it, springs, a homestead orchard, and a killing over the orchard trees in 1903.

Oak Creek Canyon

The switchback drive from red rock to ponderosa on State Route 89A

Oak Flat

Chi'chil Bildagoteel — the Apache sacred ground a copper mine is set to swallow

Oak of the Golden Dream

Gold was found in California here in 1842, six years before Sutter's Mill, and the oak it was found under is still standing.

Oatman

A gold camp in the Black Mountains that outlived its mines, now run by wild burros — reached by the wildest switchbacks left on Route 66, and named for a history worth telling straight.

Occidental Hotel

Buffalo's 1880 grand hotel, its 1908 saloon ceiling still pocked with bullet holes, won once in a poker game and nearly torn down in the 1990s.

Ogden Union Station

A grand 1924 train depot turned museum complex

Old Faithful Inn

Robert Reamer's log lobby, built in one winter to feel like a lodgepole forest, which rode out an earthquake in 1959 and a fire in 1988.

Old Fall River Road

Convicts started it in 1913, a contractor finished it in 1920, and since 1968 it has run one way, uphill, at fifteen miles an hour.

Old Idaho Penitentiary

A territorial prison that ran for 101 years on conditions that barely changed, and closed the year its prisoners burned it.

Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort State Historic Park

The 1855 adobe fort where Las Vegas began — a mile and a world away from the neon

Old Man House Park

An acre of beach on Agate Passage where the largest winter house on the coast stood until the government burned it in 1870.

Old Trail Town

Bob Edgar's rescued log buildings, outlaw cabins and an Apsáalooke scout's home among them, rebuilt on the ground where Cody City was first laid out.

Onion Creek

A scenic backroad that fords the same creek more than two dozen times beneath the spires of Fisher Towers

Onyx Summit

The highest pass any state highway crosses in Southern California, at the top of the long way into Big Bear.

Oregon Caves

A cave of marble rather than limestone, found in 1874 by a hunter who followed his dog in by matchlight and found his way out by the sound of a stream.

Oregon Dunes

Forty miles of moving sand that Frank Herbert came to write about in 1957, and a government project to stop them that gave him Dune and is now being undone.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

A summer Shakespeare season that grew from one roofless 1935 performance into one of the country's largest repertory theaters, then had to ask for an emergency rescue in 2023.

Oregon Trail Ruts State Historic Site

The clearest wagon ruts on the trail, worn by iron tires and cut deeper by travelers who hacked at the ledge to get their wagons over.

Original McDonald's Site

The corner where two brothers invented fast food, now an unofficial museum the corporation has never blessed.

Owens Lake

Patsiata, the lake Los Angeles drank, and the most expensive dust in America.

Painted Hills

Hills banded red, gold and tan that are not painted rock at all but ancient soils, formed on volcanic ash over millions of years as the climate changed.

Palace of the Governors

The long adobe on the north side of the Santa Fe plaza, called the oldest public building in continuous use in the country, though its own founding date is in dispute.

Palisade State Park

A pioneer-built lake turned central Utah's favorite state park

Palm Springs

Cahuilla homeland, checkerboard reservation, mid-century playground, and the square mile the city burned.

Palouse Falls

The falls a Palouse storyteller said a giant beaver's tail made, and that a school of Washtucna children wrote into state law in 2014.

Pancho Villa State Park

The site of Camp Furlong at Columbus, named for the revolutionary whose raiders attacked the town in 1916, as a gesture of friendship toward Mexico.

Panguitch

A well-preserved pioneer town and gateway to Bryce Canyon

Panguitch Lake

A Blue Ribbon trout lake at 8,400 feet on the Patchwork Parkway

Paradise and Sluiskin Falls

The meadows on Rainier's south slope, and the waterfall named for the Yakama guide who took the first climbers to the snow and would go no farther.

Park City

Silver built it. Snow saved it.

Park City Main Street

A historic mining town turned world-class ski and film festival destination

Park City Mountain

The largest ski resort in the United States, grown straight out of a 19th-century silver town.

Parowan Gap Petroglyphs

An ancient rock art gallery hidden in a desert canyon

Pawnee Buttes

Two remnants of a vanished plain on a grassland the government bought back from Dust Bowl homesteaders in the 1930s.

Payson Lakes

Three alpine lakes in the pines, twelve miles up Payson Canyon

Peach Springs

The capital of the Hualapai Nation — the People of the Tall Pines — on Route 66 at the rim of the Grand Canyon, gateway to Grand Canyon West and the only road to the Colorado's floor.

Pecos National Historical Park

The red walls of a 1717 mission church inside the foundations of a far larger one, beside the kiva Pecos people dug in front of the old church during the revolt of 1680.

Pendleton Woolen Mills

A mill that has woven blankets for the tribes of the Plateau since 1909, whose oldest customers folded its blankets into their own ceremonies.

Perrine Bridge

Four hundred and eighty-six feet of air between deck and river, and the one span in the country you may jump from without asking.

Pete French Round Barn

A round barn from the 1880s, built for breaking and training stock, the best-known relic of a cattle empire that ended when its owner was shot dead by a homesteader.

Petrified Forest National Park

Two hundred million years turned to stone — and a Route 66 ghost

Petroglyph National Monument

Some 24,000 images pecked into the dark basalt of Albuquerque's West Mesa, protected in 1990 and then crossed by a city boulevard.

Phoenix

The fifth-largest US city, built on the canals of a thousand-year-old one

Pictograph Cave State Park

Three sandstone shelters outside Billings whose 1937 dig gave the northern plains its timeline, and whose paintings are fading.

Pierre Wibaux House

The town office of a French cattle baron who came through the Hard Winter and bought up the range, in the town renamed for him.

Pikes Peak Cog Railway

A mattress maker's answer to a two-day mule ride, running since 1891, shut in 2017 and rebuilt from the rails up with Swiss trains in 2021.

Pioche

The silver camp that, by legend, out-killed the Old West — Boot Hill's boots-on graves, the graft-ridden Million-Dollar Courthouse, and an aerial tramway still slung over Main Street.

Pioneer Oil Refinery

The first commercially successful refinery in the West, built in 1876 to take the crude coming down the pipeline from Pico Canyon.

Pioneertown

A Western movie set built in 1946 that people moved into and never left.

Planes of Fame Air Museum

On the field where the country smelted its surplus warplanes — and about thirty of the aircraft here still fly.

Point Cabrillo Light Station

A 1909 light on the headland where a China trader's wreck set off the Mendocino lumber boom.

Point Fermin Lighthouse

The first light into San Pedro Bay, lit in 1874 by two sisters, dark since Pearl Harbor, on a bluff that is still sliding.

Point Reyes Lighthouse

A light set halfway down a cliff on purpose, because that was the only way to get it under the fog.

Point Vicente

Volunteers have counted the gray whale migration from this bluff for four decades, over water where shore whalers nearly finished the same herds.

Polebridge Mercantile

A 1914 log store past the end of the power lines, still baking for whoever makes it up the North Fork Road.

Pon Yam House

The store of Idaho City's king merchant, where the Chinese of the Boise Basin bought cuttlefish, incense and firecrackers.

Potash Road Dinosaur Tracks

Dinosaur footprints embedded in a cliff face along the Colorado River

Poudre Canyon

Colorado's only wild and scenic river, named for buried gunpowder in a story nobody can date, and burned along its length in 2020.

Powder Mountain

The largest ski resort in the United States by acreage — a famously uncrowded "PowMow" now remaking itself under Netflix's Reed Hastings.

Prehistoric Museum at USU Eastern

A small-town museum punching way above its weight in dinosaur science

Prescott

Arizona's first territorial capital — Whiskey Row, the courthouse square, and a mile-high pine town

Preston and Napoleon Dynamite

A farm town in the north end of Cache Valley that a former student turned into a set in the summer of 2003, without changing much of anything.

Price

A gritty coal mining town with a surprisingly excellent dinosaur museum

Pulaski Tunnel Trail

The mine tunnel where a ranger held his crew at gunpoint while the 1910 fire burned over them.

Puvungna

The Acjachemen and Tongva place of creation: twenty-two acres of open ground on a university campus, still not in the hands of its people.

Pyramid Lake / Kooyooe Panunadu

The Numu's sacred lake at the end of the Truckee—homeland of the cui-ui eaters, site of the 1860 war, and a century-long fight to keep the river that the silver towns dammed from draining it dry

Racetrack Playa

A dead-flat lakebed where rocks leave trails behind them, twenty-seven miles down a tire-shredding road.

Red Butte Garden

A 100-acre botanical garden with panoramic valley views

Red Canyon

A blazing red gateway carved by water and wind

Red Mountain Mining District

Three iron-red peaks above Red Mountain Pass, the 1882 Yankee Girl and its headframe, and a boom town that went up in five weeks in 1883.

Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area

The Mojave wilderness that begins where Las Vegas ends — striped sandstone cliffs and a 13-mile scenic loop

Red Rocks Amphitheatre

Walker's Garden of the Titans, finished by the CCC between Ship Rock and Creation Rock and dedicated on June 15, 1941.

Register Cliff State Historic Site

The first camp out of Fort Laramie, where the oldest date on the rock reads 1829 and three emigrants never left.

Reno

The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World

Rhyolite

The most complete ghost town in Nevada — a stone city with an opera house and a marble-stepped bank that rose and died inside a decade, now the most photographed ruin in the West.

Rio Grande Gorge Bridge

A steel truss strung across a slot in the basalt west of Taos, 565 feet above the river by the careful measure and 650 by the signs, built when the road beyond it did not yet exist.

Riverside Chinatown Site

Riverside's second Chinatown — an empty lot on purpose, with eighty percent of it still underground.

Rockefeller Forest

Generally counted the largest old-growth redwood forest left, bought in 1931 and nearly lost anyway to logging on the slopes above it.

Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge

Mustard gas, nerve agent and pesticides for forty years, then bald eagles, bison and black-footed ferrets on the same ground.

Roosevelt Arch

Half of a railroad's front door; the station it faced came down in 1954.

Rosebud Battlefield State Park

The ridges where Crook's column was stopped eight days before the Little Bighorn, remembered by the Cheyenne for one woman's ride.

Rowena Crest and the Tom McCall Preserve

A crest where the Ice Age floods jammed against a basalt promontory, above a plateau of mounds no one has fully explained, and a few in the parking loop that the highway department built.

Royal Gorge Bridge

Built in six months in 1929 by a Texas promoter for people to pay to walk across, and still standing after a 2013 fire took 48 of the park's 52 buildings.

Ruby Beach

Driftwood, sea stacks and a short walk down from US-101, with Destruction Island offshore and two names on the chart that tell only the sailors' side.

Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge

The desert's last thing you'd expect — a vast spring-fed marsh at the foot of the Ruby Mountains, one of the remotest refuges in the Lower 48 and a crossroads for two flyways of migrating birds.

Ruby Valley & Newe Sogobia

The valley where the Western Shoshone signed an 1863 treaty that ceded no land — and the heart of Newe Sogobia, a homeland the Newe say was never for sale.

Running Eagle Falls

A double waterfall in Two Medicine named for Pitamakan, the Blackfeet woman who led war parties.

Ruth Lake

A hidden alpine gem reached by a short trail through wildflower meadows

Sacajawea Interpretive, Cultural and Educational Center

In the valley where she was born, a center that spells her name the way many of her people say it.

Sacramento

The Gold Rush river port that became the state capital, and jacked itself ten feet into the air to stop drowning.

Saguaro National Park

The giant cactus, and the O'odham who count it as kin

Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument

Three Spanish mission churches raised over Tiwa and Tompiro pueblos east of the Manzano Mountains in the 1600s, each of its own stone, and one never finished.

Salt Lake City

Utah's capital and largest city — where the Wasatch Range meets the Great Salt Lake.

Salt Point and Gerstle Cove

A cove where sandstone for San Francisco's streets went aboard schooners, on a point named for the salt the Kashaya Pomo came for.

Salt River Canyon

US-60's switchback plunge into the gorge that divides two Apache nations

Saltair

A haunting lakeside resort with a storied past

Salton Sea

California's largest lake, made by accident in 1905 and shrinking ever since.

Salvation Mountain

One man, thirty years, half a million gallons of donated paint, and a hill that says God is Love.

Samak Smokehouse

A rustic roadside smokehouse serving legendary smoked meats

San Francisco de Asís Church, Ranchos de Taos

The adobe church at Ranchos de Taos that artists always paint from behind, kept standing by the mud its parish spreads over it every June.

San Francisco Peaks

The sacred mountain of the west — 12,633 feet, and a live argument

San Gorgonio Mountain

The highest ground in Southern California, and the only summit down here that stands clear above the trees.

San Rafael Swell

A massive dome of exposed rock layers with slot canyons and natural bridges

Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site

Lost even to the survivors' descendants for more than a century, and found again in 1999 by tribal oral history, archives and a metal detector working together.

Sand Harbor

The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers

Sand Mountain

Nevada's largest dune — a 600-foot mountain of singing sand, a buried Pony Express station, and a butterfly found nowhere else

Santa Monica Pier

Where the Mother Road runs out of continent, and where the End of the Trail sign gives the drive somewhere to finish.

Santa Rita Copper Mine

The copper pit east of Silver City that swallowed the town it was named for, beneath a spire of volcanic rock long said to look like a nun at prayer.

Scipio

A tiny crossroads town where I-15 meets the old highway

Sedona

Red-rock skyline, Little Hollywood, and the town Sedona Schnebly gave her name to

Seligman

The town that refused to die when the interstate went around it — a barber's crusade made this the Birthplace of Historic Route 66, and the reason the Mother Road still runs.

Sheep Creek Canyon Geological Loop

A drive through twisted and upturned rock layers spanning 600 million years

Shep, Fort Benton

A sheepdog who met every train at Fort Benton for five and a half years, waiting for a master who had gone home in a coffin.

Sheridan Inn

A hunting-lodge hotel with sixty-nine gables, where Buffalo Bill is said to have auditioned Wild West acts from the porch.

Sherman Institute & the Sherman Indian Museum

The federal Indian boarding school Riverside lobbied to get — still a school today, its 1902 building now a museum.

Shore Acres State Park

A timber family's clifftop estate whose mansion burned three months after its mistress died, whose larger replacement the state could not keep, and whose gardens it did.

Shoshone Falls

Higher than Niagara, and turned up and down on a schedule. What reaches the rim is whatever the canals leave.

Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Museum

Fort Hall told from the other side of the trade counter, by the tribes whose reservation now surrounds the site of the post.

Show Low

The Rim-country town a losing hand of cards named

Shrine of the Stations of the Cross

A parish's own Calvary on the mesa above Colorado's oldest town, with bronze stations by a San Luis sculptor whose models went to the Vatican.

Silver City

An Owyhee silver camp that faded but never quite emptied, still lit by twelve-volt bulbs.