Native American Heritage
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.
CA-1 at Bear Valley Road1
CA-1 via Muir Woods Road1
CA-1, about 20 miles north of Jenner1
US-25
Fort Belknap Agency
The agency on the Milk River whose water fight gave the West its founding rule of tribal water rights in 1908.
Kootenai Falls
The Kootenai people's sacred falls, kept running free by a nine-year fight against a dam.
Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery
The world's largest salmon hatchery when it opened in 1940, built to make up for the runs Grand Coulee Dam cut off, on the fishery the Wenatchi were promised.
Sleeping Buffalo Rock
A sacred boulder marked as a resting buffalo, taken off its ridge above the Milk River in the 1930s and sheltered now beside U.S. 2.
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.
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.
Jemez Historic Site
The stone walls of a 1620s mission church standing among the ruins of Gisewa, a Jemez village named for the hot springs beside it.
CO-51
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
I-10 / I-171
I-10 / I-191
SR-111
Scenic Byway 121
US-124
Fort Fizzle
A log barricade built to stop the Nimiipuu in 1877. They climbed the ridge behind it and walked around.
Frenchtown Historic Site
Where the Walla Walla leader Peopeomoxmox, who had come to the Oregon volunteers under a white flag, was killed as their hostage on December 7, 1855.
Heart of the Monster
Where the Nimiipuu say their story begins: Coyote, a monster, and the heart he tore loose, still on the Clearwater's bank.
Travelers' Rest State Park
The one Lewis and Clark campsite with proof in the ground: hearths, gun lead and a latrine still laced with mercury.
Escondido Canyon Rd., off CA-141
SR-141
US-141
I-152
I-15 / SR-138 / Historic Route 661
I-15, exit 80 (Simplot Road)1
NM-151
I-171
SR-171
I-192
SR-202
Deception Pass
A tide race between Whidbey and Fidalgo islands that fooled George Vancouver, and the 1935 bridge that finally tied Whidbey to the mainland.
Ebey's Landing
A bluff trail above the beach where, in August 1857, a Kake raiding party came ashore to answer the shelling of their camp at Port Gamble the year before.
US-242
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.
Manitou Cliff Dwellings
A pueblo from McElmo Canyon, dismantled, shipped across the Rockies by rail and set in cement into a dynamited overhang as cliff dwellings it never was.
I-251
SR-251
US-261
US-26/WY-7891
SR-281
SR-28 at Tendoy; Agency Creek Road1
I-403
Acoma Sky City
Haak'u, the village on a sandstone mesa west of Albuquerque, seen only on the pueblo's own tours, with a mission whose roof beams were carried on foot from Mount Taylor.
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
MT-411
MT-431
CA-491
CA-49 / CA-202
CA-49 / Parrotts Ferry Road1
MT-491
US-503
Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush
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
Hundreds of desert-varnished boulders carved over eight thousand years — the Great Basin's most accessible rock art
Hickison Petroglyphs
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
NM-531
US-541
US-603
Oak Flat
Chi'chil Bildagoteel — the Apache sacred ground a copper mine is set to swallow
Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument
Three Spanish mission churches raised over Tiwa and Tompiro pueblos east of the Manzano Mountains in the 1600s, each of its own stone, and one never finished.
Salt River Canyon
US-60's switchback plunge into the gorge that divides two Apache nations
US-60 / SR-2601
US-60 / US-1801
OR-621
SR-641
US-641
Historic Route 661
Historic Route 66 / I-401
Off Historic Route 66 (Foothill/Colorado alignment)1
I-701
SR-731
OR-821
I-844
Bonneville Dam
The first federal dam on the Columbia, where someone has counted the fish climbing its ladders every year since 1938, beside an island the Corps used as a dump for forty years.
Celilo Village
The village that stayed on the bluff above the drowned falls, rebuilt half a century late by the government that flooded them, where the salmon season still opens each April.
Pendleton Woolen Mills
A mill that has woven blankets for the tribes of the Plateau since 1909, whose oldest customers folded its blankets into their own ceremonies.
Tamástslikt Cultural Institute
The only tribally owned museum on the Oregon Trail, where the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla tell the wagon migration from the side of the people it rolled through.
US-842
Bosque Redondo Memorial
The state site at Fort Sumner that for decades told the story of an army post and an outlaw, remade with Diné and Ndé people into a memorial to those held here.
Palace of the Governors
The long adobe on the north side of the Santa Fe plaza, called the oldest public building in continuous use in the country, though its own founding date is in dispute.
I-861
SR-87 / SR-2871
US-872
Decision Point
The rise where Lewis and Clark spent ten days in 1805 deciding which river was the Missouri, against nearly every man in the party.
Fort Assinniboine
The brick border post whose Buffalo Soldiers deported the Cree in 1896, and whose land became the Cree's reservation twenty years later.
SR-881
SR-89A1
SR-89A / SR-1791
US-892
I-908
Bozeman Trail at Bozeman Pass
The pass at the end of a gold-rush shortcut through other nations' hunting ground, the one road a Native war closed.
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.
Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument
A battlefield you can read by its stones: white marble where soldiers fell since 1890, red granite where warriors fell since 1999.
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.
Spokane Falls
Where the Spokane fished under a salmon chief who shared out the catch, until a dam forty miles downstream ended the runs in 1911.
Vore Buffalo Jump
A gypsum sinkhole where hunters trapped bison for 250 years, each hunt sealed in its own layer, and the reason Interstate 90 bends south here.
I-90, exit 391
CA-911
US-911
US-931
I-941
US-951
US-95 / US-121
CO-961
US-974
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.
Collier Memorial State Park and Logging Museum
An outdoor museum of a century of logging machinery in the pine woods north of Klamath Falls, given to the state by a lumberman and his banker brother.
Upper Klamath Lake
Oregon's largest lake, wide and shallow, where farms, endangered suckers and, since 2024, returning salmon all need the same water.
Yakama Nation Museum
One of the oldest tribal museums in the country, opened in 1980 under a roof shaped like a winter lodge, telling the Yakama story in the nation's own words.
US-981
Off US-101 at Balboa Blvd.1
Patricks Point Drive, off US-101 north of Trinidad1
US-1016
Bandon
A town at the mouth of the Coquille built near the site of an 1854 massacre, named for a town in Ireland, and burned in 1936 by the Irish gorse its founder planted.
Battle Rock
Port Orford's founding legend, named for a battle by the man who fired the cannon and remembered by another witness, and by the people it happened to, as something else.
Depoe Bay
A six-acre harbor reached through a crack in the basalt, on land allotted in 1894 to a Tututni man the agency knew as Depot Charley.
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.
Middle Village–Station Camp
A Chinook trading town on the north shore of the Columbia's mouth, where the ground turned up more copper, glass beads and Chinese coins than tools.
CA-111 / I-101
SR-1121
WY-1201
CO-1391
SR-1551
US-1601
US-160/US-1631
US-1631
NV-1692
CO-1721
US-1801
SR-1811
CO-1841
CA-1901
US-1912
CO-1941
MT-2001
I-2051
UT-2111
MT-2121
SR-2201
MT-2401
SR-2431
SR-2642
MT-2691
SR-2731
US-2871
SR-3051
MT-3131
MT-3141
US-3851
US-3955
Bishop
The Eastern Sierras working capital, and the home of the Nüümü who were traded out of their own valley.
Manzanar National Historic Site
A concentration camp on twice-taken ground, where the United States imprisoned more than eleven thousand of its own.
Owens Lake
Patsiata, the lake Los Angeles drank, and the most expensive dust in America.
St. Paul's Mission
A log church built in 1847 for the summer salmon gathering at Kettle Falls, ruined by the 1930s, and rebuilt in 1939, a year before the reservoir rose over the falls it was built to serve.
Stewart Indian School
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
Whitney Portal Road / Movie Road (off US-395)1
Off I-405 / San Fernando Mission Blvd.1
NV-4451
NM-4671
US-5503
Aztec Ruins National Monument
A Chacoan great house on the Animas River, misnamed by settlers who thought the Aztecs built it, with original roofs nine centuries old and a great kiva rebuilt whole.
Chaco Culture National Historical Park
The great houses of Chaco Canyon at the end of thirteen miles of washboard dirt, an International Dark Sky Park in the middle of one of the country's busiest gas fields.
Ute Indian Museum
On the farm of Ouray and Chipeta: a spring the DAR roofed with a concrete tipi in 1924, Chipeta's grave of 1925, and a museum rebuilt with the three Ute tribes in 2017.