Paid Entry
These stops charge admission — a park fee, a ticket, a toll for the maintained road — and mostly they earn it. The money keeps a trail from washing out, a ranger at the desk, a fragile place from being loved to death. If you're linking several national parks, the annual America the Beautiful pass usually pays for itself fast. Budget for the gate, know what it covers, and treat the fee as rent on something rare.
Laurel Street at CA-1, downtown Fort Bragg1
NM-11
MT-21
US-24
Conrad Mansion
Kalispell's founder built it in 1895; in 1974 the town's voters said no to owning it.
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.
Havre Beneath the Streets
Basement storefronts under a railroad town that burned twice in one January day in 1904, furnished now as a tour.
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-51
US-61
UT-91
UT-101
NM-111
Scenic Byway 123
Scenic Byway 12 / UT-631
US-121
SR-141
US-14/16/202
Buffalo Bill Center of the West
A memorial begun the year Buffalo Bill died that grew, wing by stone-walled wing, into five museums and a library under one roof.
Old Trail Town
Bob Edgar's rescued log buildings, outlaw cabins and an Apsáalooke scout's home among them, rebuilt on the ground where Cody City was first laid out.
US-14A1
I-154
Kolob Canyons
The quiet, uncrowded back door to Zion National Park
Lagoon Amusement Park
A beloved family amusement park operating since 1886
Ogden Union Station
A grand 1924 train depot turned museum complex
Thanksgiving Point
A massive complex with dinosaur bones, gardens, and a curiosity museum
I-15 (Ghost Town Road exit)1
I-15/I-901
CO-171
I-171
SR-171
SR-181
UT-181
I-191
SR-201
MT-241
US-243
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.
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.
Pikes Peak Cog Railway
A mattress maker's answer to a two-day mule ride, running since 1891, shut in 2017 and rebuilt from the rails up with Swiss trains in 2021.
UT-242
WY-241
I-251
NV-281
NV-28 / US-50 (Spooner Summit)1
WY-281
US-301
US-342
Holzwarth Historic Site
A Denver saloon keeper put out of business by prohibition, a homestead in the Kawuneeche Valley, and a dude ranch that ran from 1919 to 1973.
Old Fall River Road
Convicts started it in 1913, a contractor finished it in 1920, and since 1968 it has run one way, uphill, at fifteen miles an hour.
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.
Petrified Forest National Park
Two hundred million years turned to stone — and a Route 66 ghost
Walnut Canyon National Monument
Sinagua cliff dwellings in the limestone — the Hisatsinom
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
CA-491
CA-49 / CA-201
Tyler Foote Crossing Road (off CA-49)1
US-504
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
Royal Gorge Bridge
Built in six months in 1929 by a Texas promoter for people to pay to walk across, and still standing after a 2013 fire took 48 of the park's 52 buildings.
Sand Mountain
Nevada's largest dune — a 600-foot mountain of singing sand, a buried Pony Express station, and a butterfly found nowhere else
US-541
US-601
CA-62 / Park Boulevard1
US-621
SR-641
US-642
Capulin Volcano National Monument
A cinder cone you can drive to the top of, rising more than a thousand feet from the high plains east of Raton, whose lava broke out of its foot rather than its crater.
Taos Pueblo
Two terraced adobe houses facing each other across Red Willow Creek, lived in for something like a thousand years, with no electricity or running water inside the old walls.
Historic Route 661
Off Historic Route 66 (Foothill/Colorado alignment)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
Georgetown Loop Railroad
Scrapped in 1939 for $450, rebuilt a century after it first opened, and running again over the bridge that crosses its own track.
Hotel de Paris
A French cook's hotel in a silver town, kept for twenty-five years by a man whose name turned out not to be his own.
US-701
CA-711
I-80 / Donner Pass Road1
CO-821
UT-831
I-84 / Cole Road south of Boise1
US-844
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.
Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad
A narrow-gauge steam railroad from Chama over 10,015-foot Cumbres Pass to Antonito, kept narrow because nobody ever thought it worth converting.
Ghost Ranch
Red, yellow and white cliffs above the Piedra Lumbre basin, where Georgia O'Keeffe bought seven acres in 1940 and paleontologists found a hillside full of dinosaurs in 1947.
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.
US-871
CA-891
SR-89A1
US-896
American West Heritage Center
A living history farm spanning 160 acres of Cache Valley
Chico Hot Springs
A miners' wash pool turned hotel, turned hospital, turned the valley's favorite place to soak.
Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park
Sweeping dunes of coral-colored sand framed by red cliffs
Minnetonka Cave
Found by a grouse hunter, named first for a porcupine and then in a language from the far side of the Rockies. Five kinds of bats winter inside.
Sunset Crater Volcano
The volcano northern Arizona watched erupt, around 1085
Wupatki National Monument
The red pueblo the volcano built — remembered, not abandoned
I-905
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.
Moss Mansion
A Billings banker's red sandstone house by the architect of the Plaza, kept as it was by the daughter who never left.
Museum of the Rockies
The bronze T. rex on the lawn is a cast of the one that went to Washington.
Pictograph Cave State Park
Three sandstone shelters outside Billings whose 1937 dig gave the northern plains its timeline, and whose paintings are fading.
UT-921
US-935
Cathedral Gorge State Park
A drained ancient lakebed eroded into buff-colored spires and narrow slot "caves" — one of Nevada's first state parks, and the gentle, otherworldly counterweight to the Silver Trails' ghost towns.
Fort Missoula
An 1877 Army post that held Italian seamen and Japanese immigrant men behind its fence in World War II.
Hoover Dam
The 726-foot Depression-era colossus that tamed the Colorado and made Las Vegas possible
Lake Mead National Recreation Area
The largest reservoir in the country — and its most legible drought gauge
Ward Charcoal Ovens
Six great stone beehives in the Egan Range — the best-preserved charcoal kilns in Nevada, and the intact relic of the fuel that fed every silver smelter
I-942
Makoshika State Park
Montana's largest state park, a badland on the edge of Glendive where the rock shows the end of the age of dinosaurs.
Miles City Bucking Horse Sale
A sale of bucking stock that began with thirty-five unwanted horses in 1950 and became eastern Montana's biggest weekend.
US-953
Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort State Historic Park
The 1855 adobe fort where Las Vegas began — a mile and a world away from the neon
The Mob Museum
Organized crime, told in the downtown courtroom that first exposed it
The Neon Museum
The Neon Boneyard — where the Strip''s discarded signs are rescued and lit again
US-971
US-981
SR-1001
Loop 1011
US-1013
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.
Yaquina Head
A basalt headland with Oregon's tallest lighthouse at the tip and, on its south side, an old quarry the sea was let back into.
UT-1012
UT-1111
SR-1121
CO-1191
CA-127 at CA-1901
UT-1481
CO-1501
UT-1501
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.
NV-1592
US-1601
US-1631
White Mountain Road (off CA-168)1
NV-1692
CO-1721
Badwater Road (CA-178)1
US-1801
CO-1841
US-1891
CA-1903
Furnace Creek
The valley hub, the hottest air temperature ever officially recorded, and the Timbisha village that was here first.
Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes
Fourteen square miles of dunes near Stovepipe Wells, and the easiest sand in the park to reach.
Zabriskie Point
Gullied gold badlands eroded out of an ancient lakebed, best at first light.
Dantes View Road (off CA-190)1
US-1916
Arches National Park
Over 2,000 natural stone arches in one extraordinary landscape
Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum
An Ancestral Puebloan ruin you can climb down into
Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area
A turquoise reservoir carved into blazing red canyon walls
Hole N the Rock
A 5,000-square-foot home carved inside a massive sandstone boulder
Museum of the Mountain Man
Six fur-trade rendezvous met near here on the Green; the only artist who ever saw one, Alfred Jacob Miller, came in 1837.
Steinaker State Park
A warm-water reservoir popular for swimming in the desert heat
CO-1941
US-1951
CA-203 / Reds Meadow Road (off US-395)1
I-2151
SR-2201
UT-2241
SR-2401
UT-2431
SR-2611
MT-2691
CA-270 (off US-395)1
UT-2751
US-2853
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.
South Park City Museum
A mining town assembled in the 1950s from buildings hauled out of South Park's dying camps, by a Colorado Springs lawyer who wanted no imitation town.
SR-2911
UT-3132
UT-3161
NV-3411
US-3803
Bottomless Lakes State Park
Nine sinkhole lakes under red bluffs east of Roswell, named by vaqueros whose ropes never touched bottom, and set aside in 1933 as New Mexico's first state park.
Lincoln Historic Site
One street of adobe in the Bonito valley kept much as it was in the 1870s, where the Lincoln County War was fought over who would supply Fort Stanton and the Mescalero agency.
Smokey Bear Historical Park
The small park in Capitan where the living Smokey Bear is buried, a cub found clinging to a burned tree in the Capitan Mountains in 1950, six years after the cartoon was invented.
US-395 / CA-1201
Off I-405 / San Fernando Mission Blvd.1
NV-4451
NM-4671
SR-5421
US-5503
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.
Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad
Steam to Silverton up the Animas since 1882, and the coal-fired locomotive cinder that federal investigators blamed for the 416 Fire of 2018.
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.
SR-7061
SR-8441
Antelope Island Road1
Bryce Canyon Park Road1
Central Avenue1
Foothill Drive1
Grand Loop Road5
Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
Hot water stained and softened the rock the river carved; Congress paid Thomas Moran $10,000 for painting it and gave the park nothing.
Grand Prismatic Spring
The rings of color are living microbial mats, and a microbe from a smaller spring nearby made DNA copying, and the COVID test, possible.
Mammoth Hot Springs
A hill of travertine still being built, two tons a day, its springs going dry in one place and breaking out in another.
Norris Geyser Basin
Yellowstone's hottest and most changeable basin, home to Steamboat, the world's tallest active geyser, which woke in 2018 after a long quiet.
Old Faithful Inn
Robert Reamer's log lobby, built in one winter to feel like a lodgepole forest, which rode out an earthquake in 1959 and a fire in 1988.