Utah · Region

Castle Country & the San Rafael Swell

The empty heart of east-central Utah — the San Rafael Swell, the richest dinosaur quarry on earth, the rock art of Nine Mile Canyon, and the coal town of Price.

7 places to explore

East-central Utah is the part of the state almost no one stops in — the long blank stretch of I-70 between the Wasatch Front and Moab, coal towns and empty desert under enormous skies. Slow down, though, and it turns out to hold dinosaurs, a thousand years of rock art, and one of the wildest uplifts of stone in the West.

That uplift is the San Rafael Swell, a dome of rock roughly seventy-five miles long that was pushed up some sixty million years ago and then carved into a labyrinth of canyons, buttes, and badlands. Interstate 70 slices clean across it, running more than a hundred miles without a town or a gas station. From the Wedge Overlook on its northern edge, the land simply drops away into the gorge of the San Rafael River — a chasm so unexpected it is known as the Little Grand Canyon.

The region's other story is deep time. The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry has produced more Jurassic dinosaur bones than any other single site on earth, a jumbled bonebed dominated by the predator Allosaurus, Utah's state fossil. The wider tale is told at the Prehistoric Museum in Price, the coal-built hub of Carbon County, and at the John Wesley Powell River History Museum in Green River, which recounts how the one-armed major first rowed these rivers in 1869. North of Price, the walls of Nine Mile Canyon — often called the longest art gallery in the world — carry a thousand years of Fremont petroglyphs.

Come for the dinosaurs and the rock art; stay for the sheer, humbling emptiness.