Activity

Stargazing

27 destinations along 26 roads

Two-thirds of Americans can't see the Milky Way from home; out here you can see fifteen thousand stars on a moonless night. That's the draw. The desert's dry, high, empty air makes the West one of the last easy places to meet a truly dark sky, and it asks almost nothing of you — pick a night near the new moon, bring a red light to save your eyes, let them adjust for twenty minutes, and look up. The show has been running the whole time. You just have to leave the lights behind.

Scenic Byway 121

Boulder Mountain

Boulder

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

Scenic Byway 12 / UT-631

Bryce Canyon National Park

Bryce Canyon City

The largest collection of hoodoos on Earth

S-22 (Borrego Salton Seaway)1

Borrego Springs

Borrego Springs

A dark-sky town ringed by state park, with 130 metal beasts loose in the desert around it.

S-22 / CA-781

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park

Borrego Springs

Six hundred thousand acres of badlands, slot canyons, and palm oases, and the biggest state park in California.

UT-241

Goblin Valley State Park

Hanksville

Thousands of mushroom-shaped rock formations in a Martian landscape

I-40 / I-171

Flagstaff

Flagstaff

The ponderosa town where they found Pluto and saved the dark

US-501

Great Basin National Park

Baker

Nevada's only national park — caves below, the oldest trees on earth above, the darkest skies overhead

SR-51 / SR-78 near Bruneau1

Bruneau Dunes State Park

Mountain Home

Sand dunes that stay where they are, in a bend the Snake River abandoned, under dark skies an hour from Boise.

CA-62 / Park Boulevard1

Joshua Tree National Park

Twentynine Palms

Where the high Mojave meets the low Colorado, among monzogranite piles and a yucca that is not a tree.

SR-641

Grand Canyon (South Rim)

Grand Canyon Village

A mile down through two billion years — and eleven nations' ground

I-701

San Rafael Swell

Castle Dale

A massive dome of exposed rock layers with slot canyons and natural bridges

US-932

Cathedral Gorge State Park

Panaca

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.

Pioche

Pioche

The silver camp that, by legend, out-killed the Old West — Boot Hill's boots-on graves, the graft-ridden Million-Dollar Courthouse, and an aerial tramway still slung over Main Street.

US-951

Tonopah

Tonopah

The Queen of the Silver Camps — the 1900 strike that saved Nevada, and the one boom town that never became a ghost: a mine you can walk into, a grand hotel, a clown motel, and the darkest skies in America.

UT-1481

Cedar Breaks National Monument

Brian Head

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

CO-1501

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve

Mosca

Saved from gold miners and a cement plant by women's clubs in 1932, and made a national park in 2004 to keep the valley's groundwater from being piped away.

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

CA-1781

Trona Pinnacles

Trona

More than five hundred tufa spires standing on a dry Pleistocene lakebed outside Ridgecrest.

US-1801

City of Rocks State Park

Deming

Pinnacles of volcanic tuff up to forty feet high standing in the grassland between Deming and Silver City, worn out of an eruption 34.9 million years ago.

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.

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

UT-3131

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.

US-5501

Chaco Culture National Historical Park

Nageezi

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.

Kodachrome Basin Road1

Kodachrome Basin State Park

Cannonville

A valley of 67 stone chimneys rising from the desert floor

Related tags

Dark SkyPhotographyPaid EntryHikingScenic DrivingFreeOff the Beaten PathSandstone