Skyline Drive is the high road — a hundred-plus miles of dirt and gravel running the entire crest of the Wasatch Plateau, most of it above ten thousand feet, which makes it one of the highest sustained roads in the country. It is the spine the whole region hangs from: the Manti-La Sal forest's Manti division spreads out from it, the canyons climb up to meet it, and the US-89 Heritage Highway towns sit in a row at its feet, two thousand feet below.
The road runs roughly north to south, from near Tucker on US-6 in Spanish Fork Canyon — up-canyon from the site of the 1983 Thistle landslide — down to Salina Canyon and Interstate 70, and along the way it never really comes down. It threads alpine meadows and spruce-fir forest, skirts a string of trout lakes and reservoirs, and in places narrows to a hogback barely wider than the road, the land falling away on both sides — west across the farm valley toward Fairview and the Sanpete towns, east into the canyon country and the distant San Rafael Swell. The Civilian Conservation Corps built most of it in the 1930s, though parts follow stock and timber routes the settlers had used since the 1880s.
This is genuinely high country, and it behaves like it. The road is snowbound most of the year and usually opens only from about July into October; even then it is rough, often demanding high clearance, and an afternoon thunderstorm can turn the surface to grease in minutes. The reward is a drive with almost no equal in the state — five or six hours end to end, wildflowers in July, gold aspen in late September, and views that simply do not stop. The paved Highway 31, climbing east out of Fairview, is the easiest way onto the central stretch; canyon roads from Mayfield and the other valley towns are the rest of the doors up onto the ridge.
The closest stops worth working into your route