Hiking
Hiking in the West runs the full range, from a paved quarter-mile to an overlook to a committing scramble with no shade and no water. What ties them together is the desert's one hard rule: it's drier, hotter, and bigger than it looks. Carry more water than you think you need, start early to beat both the heat and the afternoon storms, and turn around before you want to. These trails give back exactly what the terrain demands you respect — go in clear-eyed and they're the best of the trip.
CA-1 at Bear Valley Road1
CA-1 at Point Arena; Lighthouse Road1
CA-1 via Muir Woods Road1
CA-1, about 1 mile north of Caspar1
Point Cabrillo Drive, off CA-1 between Mendocino and Fort Bragg1
MT-21
US-21
NM-42
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.
Valles Caldera National Preserve
A crater thirteen miles across, floored with grass, left by an eruption 1.25 million years ago and owned privately for 140 years under a law that called it vacant land.
I-52
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.
The Table Rocks
Two horseshoe mesas the Takelma called Ti'tanak, where the 1853 treaty was signed at the foot of one, with a wildflower on top that grows nowhere else.
IR-71
MT-71
SR-91
UT-92
I-10 / I-191
Scenic Byway 126
Boulder Mountain
A 50-mile forested plateau at 11,000 feet with 80 alpine lakes
Escalante Petrified Forest State Park
Walk among 150-million-year-old stone trees
Lower Calf Creek Falls
A 126-foot waterfall hidden in a desert canyon
Mossy Cave Trail
A hidden waterfall and ice cave just off the highway
Red Canyon
A blazing red gateway carved by water and wind
Upper Calf Creek Falls
A remote 88-foot cascade reached by a rugged trail
Scenic Byway 12 / UT-631
CO-141
Escondido Canyon Rd., off CA-141
Placerita Canyon Rd., off CA-141
I-152
Kelbaker Road (off I-15 / I-40)1
Nebo Loop Road (FR-015)2
NM-151
SR-171
UT-181
SR-201
US-20 / Menan-Lorenzo Highway1
S-22 / CA-781
SR-241
US-242
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.
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.
UT-243
WY-241
Hunt Road, off SR-25 near Eden1
I-252
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.
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.
UT-251
NV-28 / US-50 (Spooner Summit)1
OR-311
SR-381
Donner Pass Road (old US-40)1
I-403
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.
Walnut Canyon National Monument
Sinagua cliff dwellings in the limestone — the Hisatsinom
US-401
MT-431
SR-47 (Mesa Falls Scenic Byway)1
MT-491
Tyler Foote Crossing Road (off CA-49)1
US-503
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.
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
Great Basin National Park
Nevada's only national park — caves below, the oldest trees on earth above, the darkest skies overhead
NM-532
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.
US-541
CA-62 / Park Boulevard1
SR-641
US-641
Historic Route 66 (National Trails Highway)1
I-704
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.
Fremont Indian State Park
The largest known Fremont Indian village ever discovered
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.
San Rafael Swell
A massive dome of exposed rock layers with slot canyons and natural bridges
US-701
I-801
CO-821
I-841
US-841
US-871
SR-881
CA-891
SR-89A1
SR-89A / SR-1791
US-896
Jardine Juniper
One of the oldest living trees in the world at over 1,500 years old
Logan Canyon
A winding National Scenic Byway through limestone cliffs and alpine forest
Manti-La Sal National Forest
Alpine peaks rising above red rock desert
Sunset Crater Volcano
The volcano northern Arizona watched erupt, around 1085
Wind Cave Trail
A short hike to a triple-arched limestone cave overlooking the canyon
Wupatki National Monument
The red pueblo the volcano built — remembered, not abandoned
US-89/911
I-904
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.
Madison Buffalo Jump State Park
A limestone cliff where people drove bison over the edge for two thousand years, until horses made it unnecessary.
Missouri Headwaters State Park
Where the expedition named three rivers, and where the trappers who came back after it learned whose country it was.
Pictograph Cave State Park
Three sandstone shelters outside Billings whose 1937 dig gave the northern plains its timeline, and whose paintings are fading.
I-90 at Wallace; Placer Creek Road (FR 456)1
CA-911
UT-922
CO-931
I-941
US-972
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.
Smith Rock State Park
Ridges of welded tuff from what geologists call Oregon's greatest eruption, cut by the Crooked River into orange walls and a 350-foot spire called Monkey Face.
SR-1001
Davison Road, off US-101 north of Orick1
Mattole Road, off US-101 and the Avenue of the Giants1
US-1014
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.
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.
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.
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.
UT-1282
WY-1301
WY-1311
SR-1381
CO-1501
UT-1504
Bald Mountain Pass
The highest point on the Mirror Lake Highway at 10,715 feet
Mirror Lake
A pristine alpine lake reflecting the Uinta peaks like glass
Ruth Lake
A hidden alpine gem reached by a short trail through wildflower meadows
Trial Lake
A popular high-alpine fishing lake surrounded by granite peaks
SR-1552
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.
Steamboat Rock
An 800-foot basalt butte that geologists read as the remains of a waterfall twice the height of Dry Falls, now almost an island in a reservoir pumped up from the Columbia.