Activity

Scenic Driving

106 destinations along 84 roads

Out here the drive is often the destination. The West built some of its best experiences at highway speed — a pass that opens onto a hundred miles of basin and range, a canyon the road threads rather than avoids, an overlook worth the pull-off and the ten minutes. These are the stops that reward keeping the map loose and the tank full. Roll the windows down, let the radio fade between towns, and treat the pavement itself as the thing you came for.

CA-11

Muir Beach Overlook

Muir Beach

A cliff edge on Highway 1, and the concrete dugouts where two-man crews watched the sea after Pearl Harbor.

US-21

Hungry Horse Dam

Hungry Horse

Named for two freight horses that nearly starved in the snow, and home to the tallest morning-glory spillway in the world.

NM-41

Valles Caldera National Preserve

Los Alamos

A crater thirteen miles across, floored with grass, left by an eruption 1.25 million years ago and owned privately for 140 years under a law that called it vacant land.

CO-51

Mount Blue Sky

Idaho Springs

Rosalie for a painter, Evans for a governor, and since 2023 a name the Cheyenne and Arapaho asked for, at the top of North America's highest paved road.

IR-71

Canyon de Chelly

Chinle

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

UT-93

Checkerboard Mesa

Springdale

A 900-foot dome of Navajo sandstone scored into a natural grid, near Zion's east entrance

Zion National Park

Springdale

Towering sandstone cliffs that glow like fire at sunset

Zion–Mount Carmel Tunnel

Springdale

A mile-long tunnel blasted through Zion's sandstone in 1930, with windows cut in the cliff for light

UT-101

Wedge Overlook

Castle Dale

Utah's "Little Grand Canyon" — a 1,200-foot drop into the San Rafael Swell.

Scenic Byway 124

Boulder Mountain

Boulder

A 50-mile forested plateau at 11,000 feet with 80 alpine lakes

Kiva Koffeehouse

Escalante

A hand-built cliffside coffee shop with canyon views

Red Canyon

Panguitch

A blazing red gateway carved by water and wind

The Hogback

Boulder

A knife-edge ridge with 1000-foot drops on both sides

Scenic Byway 12 / UT-241

Torrey

A charming gateway town for Capitol Reef National Park

Scenic Byway 12 / UT-631

Bryce Canyon National Park

Bryce Canyon City

The largest collection of hoodoos on Earth

US-12, milepost 1651

DeVoto Memorial Cedar Grove

Lolo Pass

Thousand-year-old cedars on the Lochsa headwaters, where the editor of Lewis and Clark's journals asked to be scattered.

UT-121

Hells Backbone Road

Escalante

A 38-mile gravel detour with a 1,500-foot drop on either side

CO-141

Poudre Canyon

Fort Collins

Colorado's only wild and scenic river, named for buried gunpowder in a story nobody can date, and burned along its length in 2020.

I-152

Kolob Canyons

Cedar City

The quiet, uncrowded back door to Zion National Park

Virgin River Gorge

Littlefield

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 / 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.

Nebo Loop Road (FR-015)1

Nebo Loop Summit

Payson

The byway's 9,300-foot high point, with Utah Valley spread out below

NM-151

Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument

Silver City

Rooms built into five caves above a Gila side canyon in the late 1270s and lived in for about a generation, at the end of forty-four winding miles of mountain road from Silver City.

SR-201

Deception Pass

Oak Harbor

A tide race between Whidbey and Fidalgo islands that fooled George Vancouver, and the 1935 bridge that finally tied Whidbey to the mainland.

WY-221

Teton Pass

Wilson

The trail the Astorians crossed in 1811, the six wagons of 1889, the highway of 1969, and the hairpin that slid off the mountain in 2024.

UT-241

Capitol Reef National Park

Torrey

Utah's most underrated national park — a 100-mile wrinkle in the Earth

UT-251

Fishlake National Forest

Richfield

Home to Pando — the largest living organism on Earth

SR-28 at Tendoy; Agency Creek Road1

Lemhi Pass

Tendoy

Lewis walked up a Shoshone road looking for the Pacific and saw only more mountains.

UT-311

Skyline Drive

Fairview

A hundred miles of dirt along the 10,000-foot crest of the Wasatch Plateau

US-341

Old Fall River Road

Estes Park

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.

SR-381

Onyx Summit

Big Bear City

The highest pass any state highway crosses in Southern California, at the top of the long way into Big Bear.

I-401

Petrified Forest National Park

Holbrook

Two hundred million years turned to stone — and a Route 66 ghost

I-40 / Historic Route 661

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.

I-40 / Historic Route 66 / US-931

Kingman

The working hub of Route 66 in Arizona — a railroad town named for a surveyor, Andy Devine's hometown, and the last real stop before the road's two wildest endings.

UT-441

Sheep Creek Canyon Geological Loop

Manila

A drive through twisted and upturned rock layers spanning 600 million years

SR-47 (Mesa Falls Scenic Byway)1

Mesa Falls

Ashton

The inn went up with a dam in mind. The dam never came, and the Henrys Fork still drops 114 feet untouched.

US-503

Austin

A silver boomtown that hit ten thousand and fell to under two hundred — the living ghost town at the high middle of US-50

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

Glenbrook & Spooner Summit

Carson City

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

SR-55; Banks-Lowman Road (SR-17)1

Banks and the North Fork Payette

Banks

Where the Payette's two forks meet, below fifteen miles of continuous Class V whitewater beside the highway.

US-602

Salt River Canyon

Globe

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

Very Large Array

Magdalena

Twenty-seven radio dishes, each 82 feet across and 230 tons, spread in a Y across an Ice Age lakebed on the Plains of San Agustin and moved on rails to change how sharply they see.

US-642

Capulin Volcano National Monument

Capulin

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.

Rio Grande Gorge Bridge

Taos

A steel truss strung across a slot in the basalt west of Taos, 565 feet above the river by the careful measure and 650 by the signs, built when the road beyond it did not yet exist.

CO-651

Grand Mesa

Cedaredge

An old valley floor turned into a mountaintop by lava, holding more than three hundred lakes, with a road up its western cliffs built by veterans of the CCC.

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.

Oatman Highway (Historic Route 66)1

Oatman

A gold camp in the Black Mountains that outlived its mines, now run by wild burros — reached by the wildest switchbacks left on Route 66, and named for a history worth telling straight.

I-702

Colorado National Monument

Grand Junction

A homemade road of fifty-four switchbacks, then the CCC's Rim Rock Drive, nineteen years in the building and finished in 1950.

Glenwood Canyon

Glenwood Springs

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.

US-701

White Sands National Park

Alamogordo

The largest gypsum dunefield on Earth, a national park since 2019, surrounded on all sides by military ground whose missile tests close its only road for hours at a time.

SR-75 (Sawtooth Scenic Byway)1

Galena Summit Overlook

Stanley

The Salmon River's first miles, seen from an overlook named for the couple who helped keep a mine out of the view.

NM-761

El Santuario de Chimayó

Chimayo

A small adobe shrine on the High Road to Taos, built around 1816 over earth that pilgrims still carry away in hope of healing.

I-802

Bonneville Salt Flats

Wendover

A blindingly white desert where land speed records are born

Great Salt Lake

Salt Lake City

The largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere

CO-821

Independence Pass

Aspen

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.

US-841

Ghost Ranch

Abiquiu

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.

SR-881

The Apache Trail

Apache Junction

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

SR-89A1

Oak Creek Canyon

Sedona

The switchback drive from red rock to ponderosa on State Route 89A

SR-89A / SR-1791

Sedona

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

US-894

Bear Lake

Garden City

The Caribbean of the Rockies — a turquoise lake straddling the Utah-Idaho border

Big Rock Candy Mountain

Marysvale

The real mountain that inspired the famous hobo folk song

Logan Canyon

Logan

A winding National Scenic Byway through limestone cliffs and alpine forest

Manti-La Sal National Forest

Manti

Alpine peaks rising above red rock desert

I-901

Bozeman Trail at Bozeman Pass

Bozeman

The pass at the end of a gold-rush shortcut through other nations' hunting ground, the one road a Native war closed.

UT-921

Alpine Loop Summit

American Fork

The 8,000-foot high point of the Alpine Loop, face to face with Mount Timpanogos

US-931

Lake Mead National Recreation Area

Boulder City

The largest reservoir in the country — and its most legible drought gauge

US-951

Beatty

The town that water built and water kept — the Bullfrog boom's lone survivor, now Nevada's gateway to Death Valley, with wild burros wandering Main Street.

UT-1282

Onion Creek

Moab

A scenic backroad that fords the same creek more than two dozen times beneath the spires of Fisher Towers

UT-128 Colorado River Road

Moab

A winding road through red rock canyons along the Colorado River

CO-1391

Canyon Pintado

Rangely

Fremont figures and Ute horses painted and pecked along fifteen miles of Highway 139, named the Painted Canyon by Escalante in 1776.

UT-1481

Cedar Breaks National Monument

Brian Head

A 2,000-foot-deep amphitheater of vivid orange and red rock

UT-1503

Bald Mountain Pass

Kamas

The highest point on the Mirror Lake Highway at 10,715 feet

Kamas

A ranching town and gateway to the Uinta Mountains

Mirror Lake

Kamas

A pristine alpine lake reflecting the Uinta peaks like glass

NV-1571

Mount Charleston & the Spring Mountains

Las Vegas

A nearly 12,000-foot sky island 35 miles from the Strip — alpine forest above the Mojave

NV-1591

Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area

Las Vegas

The Mojave wilderness that begins where Las Vegas ends — striped sandstone cliffs and a 13-mile scenic loop

US-1631

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Mexican Hat

The most iconic Western landscape on Earth

Dantes View Road (off CA-190)1

Dantes View

Furnace Creek

A 5,475-foot balcony on the Black Mountains crest with Badwater a vertical mile below.

US-1913

Arches National Park

Moab

Over 2,000 natural stone arches in one extraordinary landscape

Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area

Manila

A turquoise reservoir carved into blazing red canyon walls

Moab

The adventure capital of the American Southwest

US-1951

Steptoe Butte

Colfax

James 'Cashup' Davis opened a hotel on the summit on July 4, 1888, at seventy-two; he died alone in it eight years later, and it burned in 1911.

OR-2051

Steens Mountain

Frenchglen

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.

MT-2121

CSKT Bison Range

Moiese

The herd the tribes saved, the government forced them to sell, and the range they finally got back.

US-2121

Beartooth Highway

Red Lodge

A road over the top of the world, built because a coal town's mines closed and it needed tourists instead.

NV-2271

Lamoille Canyon & the Ruby Mountains

Lamoille

The great exception to Nevada's sagebrush monotony — a glacier-carved canyon and a wall of eleven-thousand-foot granite peaks an hour southeast of Elko, fairly called the state's Alps.

UT-2611

Moki Dugway

Mexican Hat

A heart-pounding series of switchbacks carved into a cliff face

UT-261 / US-1631

Valley of the Gods

Mexican Hat

A free, uncrowded alternative to Monument Valley

UT-2751

Natural Bridges National Monument

Blanding

Three massive natural bridges carved by ancient streams

MT-3131

Yellowtail Dam

Fort Smith

A 525-foot dam at the mouth of Bighorn Canyon, named for the Crow leader who fought hardest to stop it.

UT-3132

Canyonlands National Park - Island in the Sky

Moab

A flat-topped mesa with views that stretch to infinity

Dead Horse Point State Park

Moab

A 2,000-foot sheer drop overlooking the Colorado River

UT-3161

Goosenecks State Park

Mexican Hat

A 1,000-foot-deep river canyon with impossibly tight meanders

SR-3751

Extraterrestrial Highway

Rachel

Ninety-eight lonely miles of State Route 375 past the back roads to Area 51 — with the Little A'Le'Inn in Rachel, the legend of the Black Mailbox, and some of the darkest skies in the country.

SR-5421

Artist Point

Glacier

The end of the Mount Baker Highway, a ridge between Baker and Shuksan below the ski area that holds the world record for snow in a single season.

US-5501

Red Mountain Mining District

Ouray

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.

Antelope Island Road1

Antelope Island State Park

Syracuse

A rugged island in the Great Salt Lake with free-roaming bison

Burr Trail Road1

Burr Trail Road

Boulder

A jaw-dropping backcountry road through slot canyons to Capitol Reef

Castle Valley Road1

Castle Valley

Moab

A stunning valley dominated by the iconic Castleton Tower

Cottonwood Canyon Road1

Grosvenor Arch

Cannonville

A massive double arch named for the National Geographic Society president

Emigration Canyon Road1

Emigration Canyon

Salt Lake City

The final stretch of trail the Mormon pioneers took into the valley

Historic Columbia River Highway2

Rowena Crest and the Tom McCall Preserve

Mosier

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

Corbett

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.

Kodachrome Basin Road1

Kodachrome Basin State Park

Cannonville

A valley of 67 stone chimneys rising from the desert floor

Nine Mile Canyon Road1

Nine Mile Canyon

Price

The longest art gallery in the world — thousands of ancient rock art panels

Old Spanish Trail1

Saguaro National Park

Tucson

The giant cactus, and the O'odham who count it as kin