Theme

Film Locations

21 destinations along 19 roads

The landscape you picture when you picture "the West" was mostly filmed here. John Ford shot nine of his westerns in Monument Valley, starting with Stagecoach in 1939, and the red buttes became Hollywood's shorthand for the frontier — the country John Wayne rode across. But Monument Valley is Diné land, and no settler wagon train ever crossed it; the mythic West on screen was Navajo homeland, in films that usually cast Native people as the enemy. Today the Navajo Nation runs the park and guides the tours. Moab and Kanab, "Little Hollywood," carried the rest.

Escondido Canyon Rd., off CA-141

Vasquez Rocks

Agua Dulce

Sandstone beds stood on end by the fault underneath, on Tataviam ground, named for a man the county hanged.

I-152

Las Vegas Strip

Las Vegas

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

Lehi Roller Mills

Lehi

The flour mill from the movie Footloose

SR-181

Lake Arrowhead Village

Lake Arrowhead

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

US-261

Timberline Lodge

Government Camp

A lodge raised by hand by relief workers in 1936-38, from boulders off the mountain and iron forged from old railroad rails, and dark for an unpaid power bill less than twenty years later.

US-341

Stanley Hotel

Estes Park

Built by a steam-car maker who came west to die of tuberculosis and lived thirty-seven more years, then rescued by one night in Room 217.

US-601

Very Large Array

Magdalena

Twenty-seven radio dishes, each 82 feet across and 230 tons, spread in a Y across an Ice Age lakebed on the Plains of San Agustin and moved on rails to change how sharply they see.