Vibe

Kid-Friendly

52 destinations along 35 roads

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-61

Prehistoric Museum at USU Eastern

Price

A small-town museum punching way above its weight in dinosaur science

I-10 / I-171

Phoenix

The fifth-largest US city, built on the canals of a thousand-year-old one

I-10 / I-191

Tucson

The Old Pueblo — four thousand years of farming under the sky islands

UT-101

Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry

Cleveland

The densest concentration of Jurassic-era dinosaur bones ever found

Scenic Byway 124

Anasazi State Park Museum

Boulder

Ruins of a 900-year-old Ancestral Puebloan village

Escalante Interagency Visitor Center

Escalante

Your essential stop before heading into the backcountry

Escalante Petrified Forest State Park

Escalante

Walk among 150-million-year-old stone trees

Mossy Cave Trail

Tropic

A hidden waterfall and ice cave just off the highway

I-155

Hill Aerospace Museum

Roy

Over 90 military aircraft displayed indoors and on the tarmac

Lagoon Amusement Park

Farmington

A beloved family amusement park operating since 1886

Ogden Union Station

Ogden

A grand 1924 train depot turned museum complex

Temple Square

Salt Lake City

The spiritual and architectural heart of Salt Lake City

Thanksgiving Point

Lehi

A massive complex with dinosaur bones, gardens, and a curiosity museum

I-15 / I-701

Cove Fort

Beaver

A beautifully restored 1867 pioneer fort at the crossroads of two interstates

I-171

Montezuma Castle

Camp Verde

A five-story Sinagua cliff dwelling, misnamed for an emperor who was never here

UT-241

Goblin Valley State Park

Hanksville

Thousands of mushroom-shaped rock formations in a Martian landscape

I-40 / Historic Route 661

Williams

The last town on Route 66 to lose its traffic to the interstate — a rail gateway to the Grand Canyon since 1901, bypassed only in 1984 after a court fight, and revived twice over.

I-40 / I-171

Flagstaff

The ponderosa town where they found Pluto and saved the dark

US-403

Dinosaur National Monument

Jensen

A wall of 1,500 dinosaur bones still embedded in the rock where they were found

Jordanelle State Park

Heber City

A sapphire reservoir nestled between the Wasatch and Uinta mountains

Utah Field House of Natural History

Vernal

A dinosaur museum with life-size replicas in an outdoor garden

US-501

Grimes Point

Fallon

Hundreds of desert-varnished boulders carved over eight thousand years — the Great Basin's most accessible rock art

I-801

California Trail Interpretive Center

Elko

A free, surprisingly ambitious BLM museum of the overland crossing — eight miles west of Elko, on the trail itself, where the California Trail met the Hastings Cutoff that doomed the Donner Party.