Photography
The West photographs almost too easily — the light does half the work, raking low across red rock at dawn and dusk, and the scale does the rest. But the good frames still ask something of you: be there for the twenty minutes the canyon glows, not the four hours it's flat; find the foreground that gives a cliff its size; come back when the season or the storm has changed the place. These stops earn a tripod. The West rewards the patient eye over the quick snapshot.
IR-71
UT-91
I-10 / I-191
UT-101
Scenic Byway 129
Anasazi State Park Museum
Ruins of a 900-year-old Ancestral Puebloan village
Boulder Mountain
A 50-mile forested plateau at 11,000 feet with 80 alpine lakes
Escalante Petrified Forest State Park
Walk among 150-million-year-old stone trees
Kiva Koffeehouse
A hand-built cliffside coffee shop with canyon views
Lower Calf Creek Falls
A 126-foot waterfall hidden in a desert canyon
Mossy Cave Trail
A hidden waterfall and ice cave just off the highway
Red Canyon
A blazing red gateway carved by water and wind
The Hogback
A knife-edge ridge with 1000-foot drops on both sides
Upper Calf Creek Falls
A remote 88-foot cascade reached by a rugged trail
Scenic Byway 12 / UT-631
I-158
Hill Aerospace Museum
Over 90 military aircraft displayed indoors and on the tarmac
Kolob Canyons
The quiet, uncrowded back door to Zion National Park
Las Vegas Strip
Four and a quarter miles of engineered spectacle — the most famous street in America (and it isn't in Las Vegas)
Lehi Roller Mills
The flour mill from the movie Footloose
Ogden Union Station
A grand 1924 train depot turned museum complex
Parowan Gap Petroglyphs
An ancient rock art gallery hidden in a desert canyon
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 / I-40 / Historic Route 661
I-15 / SR-138 / Historic Route 661
Kelbaker Road (off I-15 / I-40)2
I-171
UT-181
I-191
S-22 (Borrego Salton Seaway)1
UT-243
UT-251
NV-281
NV-28 / US-50 (Spooner Summit)1
Donner Pass Road (old US-40)1
I-402
I-40 / Historic Route 664
Holbrook
A Santa Fe railroad town once too tough for women and churches, now the seat of Navajo County, gateway to the Petrified Forest, and home to the concrete teepees of the Wigwam Motel.
Needles
Route 66's Colorado River gateway into California, anchored by El Garces, the Harvey House that Mojave hands built.
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.
Winslow
The town an Eagles lyric made famous — and the home of La Posada, the last great railroad hotel and Mary Colter's finest work, at the southern doorway to Hopi and Navajo country.
I-40 / Historic Route 66 / US-931
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
UT-441
CA-49 / CA-201
US-504
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
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
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-50 & US-3951
US-601
CA-62 / Park Boulevard1
Pioneertown Road (off CA-62)1
SR-641
Historic Route 661
Historic Route 66 (Colorado Blvd.)1
Historic Route 66 (Foothill Blvd.)1
Historic Route 66 (National Trails Highway)1
Historic Route 66 / I-401
Historic Route 66 terminus area1
Oatman Highway (Historic Route 66)1
I-702
I-805
Bonneville Salt Flats
A blindingly white desert where land speed records are born
California Trail Interpretive Center
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.
Great Salt Lake
The largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere
Reno
The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
Saltair
A haunting lakeside resort with a storied past
SR-802
UT-831
SR-87 / SR-2871
SR-881
CA-891
SR-89 / SR-691
SR-89A3
SR-89A / SR-1791
US-8911
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
Big Rock Candy Mountain
The real mountain that inspired the famous hobo folk song
Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park
Sweeping dunes of coral-colored sand framed by red cliffs
Jardine Juniper
One of the oldest living trees in the world at over 1,500 years old
Logan Canyon
A winding National Scenic Byway through limestone cliffs and alpine forest
Manti Temple
A striking pioneer-era temple crowning a hilltop above the Sanpete Valley
Manti-La Sal National Forest
Alpine peaks rising above red rock desert
Sunset Crater Volcano
The volcano northern Arizona watched erupt, around 1085
Wind Cave Trail
A short hike to a triple-arched limestone cave overlooking the canyon
Wupatki National Monument
The red pueblo the volcano built — remembered, not abandoned
US-89 / US-61
US-89/911
UT-921
US-934
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.
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
US-954
Fremont Street
Glitter Gulch — the neon canyon where Las Vegas actually began
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-981
Loop 1011
UT-1011
Beal Road (off CA-111)1
CA-1111
CA-111 / CA-861
CA-111 / I-101
UT-1111
CA-127 at CA-1901
UT-1282
UT-1481
UT-1504
Bald Mountain Pass
The highest point on the Mirror Lake Highway at 10,715 feet
Mirror Lake
A pristine alpine lake reflecting the Uinta peaks like glass
Ruth Lake
A hidden alpine gem reached by a short trail through wildflower meadows
Trial Lake
A popular high-alpine fishing lake surrounded by granite peaks
NV-1592
US-1633
White Mountain Road (off CA-168)1
NV-1692
Badwater Road (CA-178)1
US-1801
SR-1811
US-1892
CA-1902
Dantes View Road (off CA-190)1
US-1917
Arches National Park
Over 2,000 natural stone arches in one extraordinary landscape
Crystal Geyser
A cold-water geyser that erupts from an abandoned oil well
Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum
An Ancestral Puebloan ruin you can climb down into
Flaming Gorge Dam
A 502-foot concrete dam with a free guided tour inside
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
Wilson Arch
A stunning natural arch visible right from the highway