Kid-Friendly
Traveling the West with kids is its own calculation: short legs, low boredom thresholds, and a lot of country between bathrooms. These are the stops that hold up — dinosaur bones and lava tubes, short trails with a real payoff, places where a kid can touch something and where the drop-offs aren't heart-stopping. Nothing here is dumbed down; the West is one of the great places to be seven years old. Pack snacks and more water than you think, and let them set the pace.
US-22
Great Plains Dinosaur Museum
Home of Leonardo, the duckbill that kept its skin for seventy-seven million years, found in the breaks north of Malta in 2000.
Wahkpa Chu'gn Buffalo Jump
Two thousand years of bison kills in a bluff behind a Havre shopping mall, with the bones left lying where they were found.
I-5 / US-501
US-61
MT-71
I-10 / I-171
I-10 / I-191
UT-101
Scenic Byway 124
Anasazi State Park Museum
Ruins of a 900-year-old Ancestral Puebloan village
Escalante Interagency Visitor Center
Your essential stop before heading into the backcountry
Escalante Petrified Forest State Park
Walk among 150-million-year-old stone trees
Mossy Cave Trail
A hidden waterfall and ice cave just off the highway
I-155
Hill Aerospace Museum
Over 90 military aircraft displayed indoors and on the tarmac
Lagoon Amusement Park
A beloved family amusement park operating since 1886
Ogden Union Station
A grand 1924 train depot turned museum complex
Temple Square
The spiritual and architectural heart of Salt Lake City
Thanksgiving Point
A massive complex with dinosaur bones, gardens, and a curiosity museum
I-15 (Ghost Town Road exit)1
I-15 / I-40 / Historic Route 661
I-15 / I-701
CO-171
I-171
SR-181
UT-241
I-40 / Historic Route 661
I-40 / I-171
US-403
Dinosaur National Monument
A wall of 1,500 dinosaur bones still embedded in the rock where they were found
Jordanelle State Park
A sapphire reservoir nestled between the Wasatch and Uinta mountains
Utah Field House of Natural History
A dinosaur museum with life-size replicas in an outdoor garden
US-501
Historic Route 66 (Mt. Vernon Ave.)1
Historic Route 66 terminus area1
US-701
CA-711
I-801
UT-831
I-84 / Cole Road south of Boise1
SR-87 / SR-2871
US-872
Giant Springs State Park
The spring William Clark called the largest he ever saw, and the 201-foot river a fifth-grade class got into the record books.
Shep, Fort Benton
A sheepdog who met every train at Fort Benton for five and a half years, waiting for a master who had gone home in a coffin.
SR-89A1
US-895
American West Heritage Center
A living history farm spanning 160 acres of Cache Valley
Bear Lake
The Caribbean of the Rockies — a turquoise lake straddling the Utah-Idaho border
Bear Lake Raspberry Shakes
Legendary raspberry milkshakes from locally grown berries
Best Friends Animal Sanctuary
The largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States
Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park
Sweeping dunes of coral-colored sand framed by red cliffs
I-902
US-931
US-951
UT-1012
NV-1591
NV-1691
US-1892
US-1913
UT-2111
I-2151
UT-2241
UT-2431
UT-2791
US-2852
International UFO Museum and Research Center
A 1930s movie theater on Roswell's Main Street turned into a museum by two men who had been part of the 1947 story, one of them the officer who announced the flying disc.
Living Desert Zoo and Gardens State Park
A zoo and garden of the Chihuahuan Desert on the Ocotillo Hills above Carlsbad, whose animals are injured or orphaned wildlife that cannot go back to the wild.