Theme

Native American Heritage

59 destinations along 48 roads

People have lived here for more than ten thousand years, and they still do — this was never empty country. Utah is the homeland of the Ute, Southern Paiute (Nuwuvi), Goshute and Shoshone (Newe), and Diné; Nevada of the Numu, Nuwuvi, Newe, and Waší∙šiw. In each language, the name for themselves means simply "the People." Their history here includes dispossession, the 1863 and 1865 treaties meant to extinguish their claims, and outright termination — the Paiute lost federal recognition in 1954 and won it back in 1980. These are living nations on ancestral ground. Visit as a guest.

IR-71

Canyon de Chelly

Chinle

Tséyiʼ — five thousand years, the Long Walk, and the road home

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

Scenic Byway 121

Anasazi State Park Museum

Boulder

Ruins of a 900-year-old Ancestral Puebloan village

I-151

Parowan Gap Petroglyphs

Parowan

An ancient rock art gallery hidden in a desert canyon

I-15 / SR-138 / Historic Route 661

Cajon Pass

San Bernardino

The gap the San Andreas tore between two mountain ranges, and the doorway every westbound traveler has used for two centuries.

I-171

Montezuma Castle

Camp Verde

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

I-192

Mission San Xavier del Bac

Tucson

The White Dove of the Desert — the finest Spanish Baroque church in the country

Tumacácori National Historical Park

Tumacácori

Arizona's first mission, on O'odham ground along the Santa Cruz River.

I-401

Walnut Canyon National Monument

Flagstaff

Sinagua cliff dwellings in the limestone — the Hisatsinom

CA-491

Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park

Placerville

The tailrace at Coloma where a carpenter found gold in January 1848 and the world came running.

CA-49 / CA-202

Empire Mine State Historic Park

Grass Valley

The oldest, deepest, richest hard-rock gold mine in California, with 367 miles of flooded tunnels underneath.

Nevada City

Gaslamps, brick storefronts, and the Nisenan who are still fighting to be recognized on their own ground.

CA-49 / Parrotts Ferry Road1

Columbia State Historic Park

Sonora

The Gem of the Southern Mines, still open for business on a car-free Gold Rush main street.

US-503

Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush

Zephyr Cove

One of the most sacred places of the Wašiw—the Standing Gray Rock, a worn volcano the highway was blasted through and climbers bolted for sport, now closed and quiet again after the Washoe's long fight to protect it

Grimes Point

Fallon

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

Hickison Petroglyphs

Austin

Western Shoshone rock art cut into soft white tuff at a 6,500-foot summit — the easiest rock art to meet on the loneliest road

US-602

Oak Flat

Superior

Chi'chil Bildagoteel — the Apache sacred ground a copper mine is set to swallow

Salt River Canyon

Globe

US-60's switchback plunge into the gorge that divides two Apache nations

US-60 / SR-2601

Show Low

The Rim-country town a losing hand of cards named

US-60 / US-1801

Casa Malpais

Springerville

The Mogollon great house on the lava, and the catacombs sealed back shut

SR-641

Grand Canyon (South Rim)

Grand Canyon Village

A mile down through two billion years — and eleven nations' ground

Historic Route 661

Grand Canyon Caverns

Peach Springs

The largest dry cavern in the country, 210 feet under Route 66 — a Cold War fallout shelter, the deepest hotel room in America, and a Hualapai burial place the tourists once mistook for a sideshow.

Historic Route 66 / I-401

Peach Springs

The capital of the Hualapai Nation — the People of the Tall Pines — on Route 66 at the rim of the Grand Canyon, gateway to Grand Canyon West and the only road to the Colorado's floor.

Off Historic Route 66 (Foothill/Colorado alignment)1

Mission San Gabriel Arcangel

San Gabriel

The fourth Alta California mission, built on Tongva land with Tongva labor, rebuilt after arson and now telling that story straight.

I-701

Fremont Indian State Park

Richfield

The largest known Fremont Indian village ever discovered

SR-731

Fort Apache Historic Park

Whiteriver

The Army fort that became a boarding school — and came back to the Apache

SR-87 / SR-2871

Casa Grande Ruins

Coolidge

The Huhugam Great House — and the country's first archaeological reserve

SR-881

The Apache Trail

Apache Junction

The 1904 road built to raise Roosevelt Dam, still barely tamed

SR-89A1

Tuzigoot

Clarkdale

A hilltop Sinagua pueblo over the Verde, dug out of the ground in the Depression

SR-89A / SR-1791

Sedona

Red-rock skyline, Little Hollywood, and the town Sedona Schnebly gave her name to

US-892

Sunset Crater Volcano

Flagstaff

The volcano northern Arizona watched erupt, around 1085

Wupatki National Monument

Flagstaff

The red pueblo the volcano built — remembered, not abandoned

US-981

Antelope Canyon

Page

Tsé bighánílíní — where the water runs through the rock

CA-111 / I-101

Palm Springs

Cahuilla homeland, checkerboard reservation, mid-century playground, and the square mile the city burned.

US-1631

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Mexican Hat

The most iconic Western landscape on Earth

NV-1692

Lost City Museum

Overton

The Ancestral Puebloan metropolis Lake Mead drowned — and the museum that saved what it could

Valley of Fire State Park

Overton

Jurassic sand dunes turned to blazing red stone — Nevada's oldest and largest state park

US-1801

San Francisco Peaks

Flagstaff

The sacred mountain of the west — 12,633 feet, and a live argument

SR-1811

Chiricahua National Monument

Willcox

The Land of Standing-Up Rocks — Cochise and Geronimo's stronghold

CA-1901

Furnace Creek

The valley hub, the hottest air temperature ever officially recorded, and the Timbisha village that was here first.

US-1911

Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum

Blanding

An Ancestral Puebloan ruin you can climb down into

UT-2111

Newspaper Rock State Historical Monument

Monticello

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

SR-2642

The Hopi Mesas

Second Mesa

Hopituh Shi-nu-mu — twelve villages on three mesas, and Old Oraibi

Window Rock

Tségháhoodzání — the sacred arch, and the capital of the Diné

SR-2731

Mount Baldy

Greer

Dzil Ligai Si'an, the sacred White Mountain, and the summit you stop short of

US-3954

Bishop

The Eastern Sierras working capital, and the home of the Nüümü who were traded out of their own valley.

Manzanar National Historic Site

Independence

A concentration camp on twice-taken ground, where the United States imprisoned more than eleven thousand of its own.

Owens Lake

Lone Pine

Patsiata, the lake Los Angeles drank, and the most expensive dust in America.

Stewart Indian School

Carson City

The federal boarding school that took Great Basin children from 1890 to 1980 to erase their cultures—its student-built stone campus now a tribally-guided museum telling the story in alumni voices

US-395 / CA-1201

Mono Lake

Lee Vining

A saline lake older than most of the Sierra, with tufa towers and a water fight it eventually won.

Whitney Portal Road / Movie Road (off US-395)1

Alabama Hills

Lone Pine

Rounded golden granite under the Sierra wall, and Hollywoods oldest outdoor set.

NV-4451

Pyramid Lake / Koqyoqe Panunadu

Sutcliffe

The Numu's sacred lake at the end of the Truckee—homeland of the cui-ui eaters, site of the 1860 war, and a century-long fight to keep the river that the silver towns dammed from draining it dry

NV-7671

Ruby Valley & Newe Sogobia

Ruby Valley

The valley where the Western Shoshone signed an 1863 treaty that ceded no land — and the heart of Newe Sogobia, a homeland the Newe say was never for sale.