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.
CA-1, about 7 miles south of Gualala1
Goat Rock Road, off CA-1 south of Jenner1
NM-11
Point Cabrillo Drive, off CA-1 between Mendocino and Fort Bragg1
Sir Francis Drake Blvd, off CA-1 at Olema1
CR-21
US-21
NM-41
CO-51
IR-71
MT-71
UT-94
Canyon Overlook Trail
A short, exposed hike just east of the tunnel to a thousand-foot view down into Zion Canyon
Checkerboard Mesa
A 900-foot dome of Navajo sandstone scored into a natural grid, near Zion's east entrance
Springdale
Zion's south-entrance gateway town, wedged between the Watchman and the Virgin River
Zion National Park
Towering sandstone cliffs that glow like fire at sunset
I-10 / I-191
UT-102
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
US-12, milepost 1651
CO-142
I-159
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
Virgin River Gorge
For most of its length Arizona is bounded by the Colorado River, but its far northwest corner — the Arizona Strip, the slice of state strand…
I-15 / I-40 / Historic Route 661
I-15 / SR-138 / Historic Route 661
I-15/I-901
Kelbaker Road (off I-15 / I-40)2
I-171
SR-181
UT-181
I-191
US-202
US-20/26/931
S-22 (Borrego Salton Seaway)1
MT-241
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.
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-244
Capitol Reef National Park
Utah's most underrated national park — a 100-mile wrinkle in the Earth
Factory Butte
A moonscape monolith rising from Mancos Shale badlands west of Hanksville.
Goblin Valley State Park
Thousands of mushroom-shaped rock formations in a Martian landscape
Hickman Bridge Trail
A natural stone bridge framing Capitol Reefs layered cliffs
I-252
Colorado State Capitol
A capitol of Colorado granite, marble, onyx and gold, with three different steps claiming to stand exactly a mile high.
Fishers Peak State Park
The flat-topped landmark over Trinidad and Raton Pass, a trophy-hunting ranch until 2019 and Colorado's second-largest state park since 2020, with a summit trail since 2023.
UT-251
US-261
NV-281
NV-28 / US-50 (Spooner Summit)1
US-301
US-30 between Hagerman and Buhl1
SR-33; N 12000 E road1
ID-341
US-342
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.
Stanley Hotel
Built by a steam-car maker who came west to die of tuberculosis and lived thirty-seven more years, then rescued by one night in Room 217.
Donner Pass Road (old US-40)1
I-403
Blue Swallow Motel
A twelve-room tourist court on Tucumcari's stretch of Route 66, built in 1939, run for four decades by one woman, and lit by one of the most photographed motel signs on the road.
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
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
SR-47 (Mesa Falls Scenic Byway)1
CA-49 / CA-201
US-506
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
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
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-50 & US-3951
SR-51 / SR-78 near Bruneau1
SR-54, east of US-95 at Athol1
SR-55; Banks-Lowman Road (SR-17)1
US-602
CA-62 / Park Boulevard1
OR-621
Pioneertown Road (off CA-62)1
SR-641
US-641
CO-651
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
NM-681
I-707
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.
Glenwood Canyon
Interstate 70 threaded through on viaducts in 1992, buried by debris flows off a burn scar in 2021, with Hanging Lake on a permit above it.
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.
Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge
Mustard gas, nerve agent and pesticides for forty years, then bald eagles, bison and black-footed ferrets on the same ground.
San Rafael Swell
A massive dome of exposed rock layers with slot canyons and natural bridges
US-701
SR-75 (Sawtooth Scenic Byway)1
I-807
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
Metropolis
A planned farm city with a brick hotel and street lights, undone by a lawsuit from farmers at the far end of the same river.
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
Vedauwoo
Knobs of 1.4-billion-year-old granite between Laramie and Cheyenne, rough as sandpaper and famous among climbers for its wide cracks.
SR-802
CO-822
Independence Pass
Crossed by prospectors on the Fourth of July 1879, opened as a toll road for the Aspen rush in 1881, and shut by snow half of every year since.
Maroon Bells
Two fourteeners of crumbling red mudstone, called the Deadly Bells since eight people died on them in 1965, and reachable in summer only by reservation.
OR-821
UT-831
I-841
US-841
SR-87 / SR-2871
SR-881
CA-891
SR-89 / SR-691
SR-89A3
SR-89A / SR-1791
US-8912
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
Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge
The Bear River crosses this marsh twice: once in a canal into Bear Lake, and once in another canal on its way back out.
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
I-902
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.
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.
I-90, exit 391
CA-911
UT-921
CO-931
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.
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
Perrine Bridge
Four hundred and eighty-six feet of air between deck and river, and the one span in the country you may jump from without asking.
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-93; Doublespring Pass Road1
I-941
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-95; Forest Road 5171
US-971
US-981
SR-1001
Citizens Dock Road, off US-101 in Crescent City1
Loop 1011
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.
Cape Blanco Lighthouse
The westernmost light in Oregon, kept for decades by two men who spent their whole careers on the cape and, from 1903, by the state's first woman keeper.
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.
Haystack Rock
A 235-foot sea stack made of lava that ran down the Columbia from the far side of the state, now a nesting rock for tufted puffins.
Oregon Dunes
Forty miles of moving sand that Frank Herbert came to write about in 1957, and a government project to stop them that gave him Dune and is now being undone.
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-1011
Harbor Blvd. at the end of I-1101
Beal Road (off CA-111)1
CA-1111
CA-111 / CA-861
CA-111 / I-101
UT-1111
CO-1191
CA-127 at CA-1901
UT-1284
Big Bend Recreation Area
A lazy loop of the Colorado with a sandy beach, riverside camping, and a well-known bouldering field
Dewey Bridge
All that remains of Utah's longest suspension bridge — bare towers and cables over the Colorado River
Fisher Towers
Towering dark red pinnacles rising 900 feet from the desert floor
UT-128 Colorado River Road
A winding road through red rock canyons along the Colorado River
UT-1481
CO-1501
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
CO-1591
NV-1592
US-1601
US-1633
White Mountain Road (off CA-168)1
NV-1692
Badwater Road (CA-178)1
US-1802
SR-1811
Capitol Boulevard / I-1841
US-1892
CA-1902
Dantes View Road (off CA-190)1
US-19111
Arches National Park
Over 2,000 natural stone arches in one extraordinary landscape
Boar's Tusk and the Killpecker Dunes
The throat of a vanished volcano made of rock from the mantle, standing over a fifty-five-mile river of dunes that crosses the Continental Divide.
Crazy Mountains
Awaxaawippíia, the Apsáalooke's holiest mountains, where young Plenty Coups saw the end of the buffalo.
Crystal Geyser
A cold-water geyser that erupts from an abandoned oil well
Cunningham Cabin
An 1888 dog-trot homestead cabin where a posse shot two men in 1893, and the valley decided not to talk about it.
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
Mormon Row Historic District
A Latter-day Saint farm village on Antelope Flats, its ditches still running and the Moulton barns still standing against the Tetons.
Wilson Arch
A stunning natural arch visible right from the highway
US-1951
CA-203 / Reds Meadow Road (off US-395)1
OR-2053
Alvord Desert
A twelve-mile playa in the rain shadow of Steens Mountain where, in December 1976, a deaf stuntwoman drove a rocket car to a women's land speed record she was not allowed to push past.
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge
A lake-and-marsh refuge set aside for its birds in 1908 that had to buy a river's water to keep them, and now fights the carp that have eaten away its marshes.
Steens Mountain
A single tilted block of the earth's crust thirty miles long that rises gently from the west and drops a mile on the east, its top carved by glaciers into gorges two thousand feet deep.
Foothill Blvd. near I-2101
UT-2111
MT-2121
US-2121
OR-2141
UT-2242
NV-2271
MT-2401
SR-2611
UT-2611
UT-261 / US-1631
SR-2641
MT-2691
CA-270 (off US-395)1
UT-2792
MT-3081
MT-3131
UT-3132
UT-3161
NV-3411
NV-374 / US-951
US-395 / CA-1201
Whitney Portal Road (off US-395)1
Whitney Portal Road / Movie Road (off US-395)1
C-4701
500 East1
US-5502
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.
Red Mountain Mining District
Three iron-red peaks above Red Mountain Pass, the 1882 Yankee Girl and its headframe, and a boom town that went up in five weeks in 1883.
700 East1
NV-7671
Antelope Island Road1
Bridge Lane1
Bryce Canyon Park Road1
Burr Trail Road1
Cape Arago Highway1
Castle Valley Road1
Cottonwood Canyon Road1
Dry Fork Road1
Elba-Almo Road, west of Almo1
Emigration Canyon Road1
Ensign Vista Drive1
Falls Avenue east of Twin Falls; Shoshone Falls Grade Road1
Fantasy Canyon Road1
Foothill Drive1
Going-to-the-Sun Road1
Grand Loop Road4
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.
Gros Ventre Road1
Historic Columbia River Highway2
Rowena Crest and the Tom McCall Preserve
A crest where the Ice Age floods jammed against a basalt promontory, above a plateau of mounds no one has fully explained, and a few in the parking loop that the highway department built.
Vista House at Crown Point
A rest stop on a basalt point 733 feet above the Columbia, budgeted at $12,000, finished for about $100,000, and mocked for years as Oregon's most expensive outhouse.