The northern end of the La Sal Loop Road seen from the air, where it comes down out of the hills into Castle Valley from Highway 128 — two lanes with a double yellow line curving up the middle of the frame through deeply rilled red slopes, one vehicle on the pavement at the top of the rise. A tall mesa capped in dark red rock fills the right side above long fluted talus, and beyond the road the ground opens into a wide valley with a green river bottom and a line of flat-topped mesas running back to the horizon under thin cloud. Arches, Canyonlands and the town of Moab — the region's headline places — are all out of frame.
Carter Pape / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Utah · Region

Moab & Canyon Country

Utah's red-rock basecamp on the Colorado River — Arches, Canyonlands, and a dense web of overlooks, river roads, and slickrock around the town of Moab.

19 places to explore

Moab is a small town with an outsized job: it is the basecamp for the most concentrated stretch of red-rock scenery in the country. Set on the Colorado River in southeastern Utah and surrounded on three sides by national parks, canyons, and slickrock, Moab is where most of canyon country begins — a former uranium-mining town that reinvented itself as the mountain-biking and four-wheeling capital of the West, and the gateway to two of Utah's five national parks.

Those two parks are the headline. Arches National Park, just north of town, holds the densest collection of natural stone arches on Earth — more than 2,000 of them, including the free-standing span of Delicate Arch that ended up on the state's license plate. Canyonlands, larger and wilder, splits into districts carved by the Colorado and Green rivers; its Island in the Sky mesa drops away on every side into a thousand feet of layered canyon. Nearby, Dead Horse Point State Park delivers the single most photographed overlook of the Colorado's gooseneck bends.

But the country around Moab rewards the side roads as much as the parks. East of town, State Route 128 leaves the highway and follows the Colorado upstream beneath the spires of Fisher Towers and the red walls of Castle Valley — one of the most beautiful drives in the state. Short trails lead to Corona Arch and into the cottonwood-shaded depths of Grandstaff Canyon; roadside slabs hold dinosaur tracks along Potash Road and Ancestral Puebloan rock art at Newspaper Rock. The human history runs from the ghost town of Cisco out on the old highway to the roadside kitsch of Hole N the Rock south of town.

It is high desert, which means it runs hot: summer midday temperatures regularly clear 100 degrees, and spring and fall are the seasons that make the place. But for sheer density of things worth stopping for — parks, arches, overlooks, rivers, rock art, and the roads between them — no corner of Utah packs in more than the country around Moab.

What to See in Moab & Canyon Country

19 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

Delicate Arch standing free on a slickrock bench, lit deep orange by low sun, its two thick legs tapering to a curved span. Snow-streaked peaks stand on the horizon behind, and heavy grey cloud fills the upper half of the frame.

Arches National Park

Moab

Over 2,000 natural stone arches in one extraordinary landscape

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A wide panorama from a canyon rim in winter, looking out over tiers of red rock benches and buttes with snow lying in the hollows. A dark cliff edge cuts into the frame at the left, and distant snow-capped mountains sit on the horizon under a clear sky.

Canyonlands National Park - Island in the Sky

Moab

A flat-topped mesa with views that stretch to infinity

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A broad valley at sunrise seen from above, juniper-dotted grassland in the foreground running to a long red mesa wall lit gold along its rim on the right. A slender rock tower and smaller spires rise from the valley floor in the middle distance, with hazy layered cliffs beyond.

Castle Valley

Moab

A stunning valley dominated by the iconic Castleton Tower

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A massive sandstone arch springing from a cliff wall on the left and sweeping down to the right, deep blue sky showing through the opening. Four small figures stand on the bare slickrock slope below it, giving the scale, with a red rock bench behind.

Corona Arch Trail

Moab

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

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A tall narrow column of white water erupting from a low pipe at ground level and breaking into spray at its top, against a cloudless deep blue sky. Rust-orange mineral terraces and shallow pools spread across the foreground, with low desert hills on both sides.

Crystal Geyser

Green River

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

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A tight loop of the Colorado River seen from high on the canyon rim, the pale tan water curving around a green-fringed bench of red rock. Layered cliffs and benches step away in every direction to flat-topped mesas on the hazy horizon.

Dead Horse Point State Park

Moab

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

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Dark red rock towers and fins rising behind a rocky desert slope, the tallest a slender fluted pinnacle at the center. Yucca in bloom, junipers and bunchgrass cover the red soil in the foreground, and a dirt track crosses the lower left corner.

Fisher Towers

Moab

Towering dark red pinnacles rising 900 feet from the desert floor

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A long grey slab of rock tilted at the base of a red sandstone cliff, its upper face pitted with several rounded three-toed depressions. The rock beneath the slab is dark and finely layered, and the cliff behind rises in blocky red courses.

Potash Road Dinosaur Tracks

Moab

Dinosaur footprints embedded in a cliff face along the Colorado River

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A broad low arch opening through a sandstone fin partway up a hillside, the rock pale gold and streaked, with sky showing through the opening. Junipers and desert scrub cover the slope below and a faint trail climbs toward it.

Wilson Arch

Moab

A stunning natural arch visible right from the highway

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Natural Areas

A canyon bottom filled with bright green cottonwood and willow, a sandy trail winding up the middle of the wash. Streaked sandstone walls rise steeply on both sides to pale domed slickrock above, under a bleached white sky.

Grandstaff Canyon

Moab

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

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A two-lane highway curving away across red desert toward a line of flat-topped mesas and a slender rock tower on the horizon. Sagebrush and red soil fill the foreground under a deep blue cloudless sky.

UT-128 Colorado River Road

Moab

A winding road through red rock canyons along the Colorado River

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Hikes & Trails

The Colorado River curving between red sandstone canyon walls, a dark cliff face rising close on the left and a banded, stepped wall on the right. Green tamarisk and willow crowd both banks and the foreground, under broken white cloud.

Big Bend Recreation Area

Moab

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

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Steep orange-red canyon walls seen from below against a blue sky streaked with high cloud, a buttressed cliff filling the left of the frame and lower broken ledges stepping away to the right. Sparse green brush grows along the rims.

Onion Creek

Moab

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

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Historic Sites

A wrecked single-story stone building with a collapsed roof standing alone beside a paved road on flat desert, scattered sheds, poles and derelict vehicles spread thinly behind it. A tall cumulus cloud rises over low distant mountains and dry grass fills the foreground.

Cisco

Moab

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

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An archival black and white photograph of the suspension bridge complete and intact, its timber deck and trussed railings carried on cables from a tall steel tower at the left, spanning the Colorado River. Dry grass fills the foreground and low desert hills rise beyond under an overcast sky.

Dewey Bridge

Moab

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

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A dark rock face densely covered with hundreds of pale petroglyphs pecked through the surface: human figures, horned animals, riders on horseback, bear and human footprints, spirals, circles and abstract forms, overlapping across the whole panel in many styles and depths of weathering.

Newspaper Rock State Historical Monument

Monticello

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

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Towns & Gateways

An aerial photograph looking down on a small town on a brown, meandering river, its grid of streets set among green and tan fields with circular irrigation marks. Pale eroded badlands fill the left of the frame and a highway and railway cut diagonally across it.

Green River

Green River

A small desert town famous for its melons and river adventures

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An archival photograph looking down the town's main street from above, a wide highway lined with gas station signs for Standard and Conoco, low storefronts, a motel sign and parked cars of the period. Cottonwoods fill the side streets and bare red hills rise behind the town.

Moab

Moab

The adventure capital of the American Southwest

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Roadside Stops

A May 1972 photograph of Hole N" the Rock south of Moab, the name painted in tall white letters across the red sandstone cliff above the carved-out house with a ghost of an earlier painting showing through beneath it, hand-lettered signs advertising conducted tours of the fourteen-room home, and visitors walking a rock-lined path through the yard.

Hole N the Rock

Moab

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

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Scenic Drives through Moab & Canyon Country

Scenic Byway

UT-128 Colorado River Road

A 44-mile scenic drive along the Colorado River through towering red-rock canyons — locals' choice for the most beautiful road in Utah.

44 mi · 1.5 hrs

Stories from Moab & Canyon Country

Nature

The Last of the Dark

Across the modern world the night sky has been all but erased by artificial light — most people will never see the Milky Way from home. The high, empty Colorado Plateau is the largest reservoir of real darkness left in the country, and Utah protects more of it than anywhere on Earth.

6 min read
Nature

The Skin of the Desert

The black, knobby crust between the rocks and shrubs of southern Utah is alive — a community of ancient organisms that quietly holds the whole landscape together. It can take a human lifetime to grow back, and it dies under a single boot.

6 min read
Geology

The Sea That Never Left

Every arch, sunken valley, and crumbling spire around Moab is the work of a bed of salt left behind when an inland sea dried up — and three hundred million years later, the salt is still moving.

7 min read
Culture

The Small Print at the Side of the Road

Utah's historical markers carry two stories: the one on the front, and the one at the bottom — a hundred and twenty-five years of daughters, sons, counties, towns, and one museum deciding what deserved bronze.

6 min read

Moab & Canyon Country rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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