Season

Winter

57 destinations along 48 roads

Winter splits the West in two. In the low Sonoran country — Phoenix, Tucson, the old copper and silver towns of the south — it is simply the good season, the months when the sun turns kind and the summer that would flatten you has gone quiet. Drive north and winter becomes the reason to come rather than the thing to flee: a sleigh ride out among feeding elk, a family ski hill running since 1939, red rock dusted white. Same season, opposite counsel — go south to escape it, go north to find it.

NM-11

Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge

San Antonio

A Rio Grande refuge south of Socorro where cranes and geese winter by the tens of thousands on wetlands and fields kept by people, because the river no longer floods to make them.

I-101

Mesilla Plaza

Mesilla

A plaza laid out in 1848 by people who meant to stay in Mexico, American six years later, a stage stop and Civil War headquarters, and scene of a deadly political riot in 1871.

I-10 / I-171

Phoenix

The fifth-largest US city, built on the canals of a thousand-year-old one

I-10 / I-191

Tucson

The Old Pueblo — four thousand years of farming under the sky islands

NM-111

Pancho Villa State Park

Columbus

The site of Camp Furlong at Columbus, named for the revolutionary whose raiders attacked the town in 1916, as a gesture of friendship toward Mexico.

Kelbaker Road (off I-15 / I-40)2

Kelso Depot

Baker

A grand 1920s Mission Revival rail depot standing alone in the deep Mojave, now the preserve's visitor center.

Kelso Dunes

Baker

The Mojave's largest dune field, and one of the few places on Earth where the sand booms underfoot.

SR-181

SkyPark at Santa's Village

Skyforest

The Christmas park that opened six weeks before Disneyland, and franchised itself on advice from the McDonald brothers.

UT-181

Snow Canyon State Park

Ivins

Red and white sandstone cliffs with ancient lava flows

I-191

Mission San Xavier del Bac

Tucson

The White Dove of the Desert — the finest Spanish Baroque church in the country

S-22 (Borrego Salton Seaway)1

Borrego Springs

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

I-40 / Historic Route 661

Needles

Route 66's Colorado River gateway into California, anchored by El Garces, the Harvey House that Mojave hands built.

US-401

Deer Valley

Park City

A ski-only luxury resort above Park City, now in the middle of the largest expansion in U.S. ski history.

US-541

Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

Tularosa

More than 21,000 petroglyphs on a basalt ridge above the Tularosa Basin, one of the few places in the Southwest set aside for its rock art alone, walked on a rough half-mile trail.

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.

Pioneertown Road (off CA-62)1

Pioneertown

Yucca Valley

A Western movie set built in 1946 that people moved into and never left.

Historic Route 66 (National Old Trails Road)1

Goffs

Essex

A near-ghost on the pre-1931 Route 66 alignment, keeper of a 1914 desert schoolhouse and a WWII Army camp.

Historic Route 66 (National Trails Highway)2

Amboy

Roy's Motel and Cafe and its 1959 neon boomerang, the most photographed lonely stop on Route 66.

Amboy Crater

Amboy

A near-perfect black cinder cone off Route 66, one of California's youngest volcanoes and a National Natural Landmark.

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.

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-802

Bisbee

Queen of the Copper Camps — and the deportation it tried to forget

Tombstone

The silver strike named for a death that never came

SR-87 / SR-2871

Casa Grande Ruins

Coolidge

The Huhugam Great House — and the country's first archaeological reserve

SR-882

Superstition Mountains

Apache Junction

The volcanic range that holds the Lost Dutchman legend — and outlasts it

The Apache Trail

Apache Junction

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

UT-921

Sundance Mountain Resort

Provo

Robert Redford's intimate, arts-minded ski resort on the slopes of Mount Timpanogos, in the North Fork of Provo Canyon.

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.

Loop 1011

Taliesin West

Scottsdale

Frank Lloyd Wright's desert masterwork, grown from the ground it stands on

UT-1011

Hardware Ranch Wildlife Management Area

Hyrum

A winter elk feeding ground where you can take a sleigh ride among hundreds of elk

Beal Road (off CA-111)1

Salvation Mountain

Niland

One man, thirty years, half a million gallons of donated paint, and a hill that says God is Love.

CA-1111

Bombay Beach

Niland

The lowest town in America: a drowned resort turned open-air art colony, 223 feet below sea level.

CA-111 / CA-861

Salton Sea

Mecca

California's largest lake, made by accident in 1905 and shrinking ever since.

CA-127 at CA-1901

Amargosa Opera House

Death Valley Junction

A dancer painted her own audience on the walls of a desert hall and performed for them for forty years.

UT-1431

Brian Head

Utah's highest town — a ski-and-bike base camp at the top of Parowan Canyon

UT-1581

Powder Mountain

Eden

The largest ski resort in the United States by acreage — a famously uncrowded "PowMow" now remaking itself under Netflix's Reed Hastings.

Badwater Road (CA-178)1

Badwater Basin

Furnace Creek

The lowest ground in North America, a salt pan 282 feet below sea level under two miles of mountain.

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.

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

Stovepipe Wells

Fourteen square miles of dunes near Stovepipe Wells, and the easiest sand in the park to reach.

Zabriskie Point

Furnace Creek

Gullied gold badlands eroded out of an ancient lakebed, best at first light.

UT-1902

Brighton Resort

Salt Lake City

The Salt Lake Valley's longtime local ski hill — big snow, lots of night skiing, and high-speed quads to everything.

Solitude Mountain Resort

Salt Lake City

The uncrowded, Alterra-owned resort at the head of Big Cottonwood Canyon, with Honeycomb Canyon's bowls and a quiet village base.

US-1911

National Elk Refuge

Jackson

Stephen Leek's photographs of starving elk built this winter refuge in 1912; a century of hay feeding is now its hardest question.

UT-2102

Alta Ski Area

Sandy

One of America's oldest and snowiest ski areas — ski-only, fiercely independent, and built on an old silver camp.

Snowbird

Sandy

The aerial-tram resort of Little Cottonwood Canyon, with steep terrain, deep snow, and one of the longest seasons in the country.

UT-2242

Park City

Silver built it. Snow saved it.

Park City Mountain

Park City

The largest ski resort in the United States, grown straight out of a 19th-century silver town.

UT-2261

Snowbasin

Ogden

One of the country's oldest ski areas and a 2002 Olympic downhill venue — world-class terrain that somehow still skis uncrowded.

UT-2431

Beaver Mountain Ski Area

Garden City

A family-owned ski hill that has been run by the same family since 1939

NV-374 / US-951

Rhyolite

Beatty

The most complete ghost town in Nevada — a stone city with an opera house and a marble-stepped bank that rose and died inside a decade, now the most photographed ruin in the West.

Cape Arago Highway1

Shore Acres State Park

Coos Bay

A timber family's clifftop estate whose mansion burned three months after its mistress died, whose larger replacement the state could not keep, and whose gardens it did.

Central Avenue1

Heard Museum

Phoenix

The Native Southwest, told in the first person

North Death Valley Highway1

Ubehebe Crater

Stovepipe Wells

A half-mile-wide steam-blast crater at the north end of the valley, and one of the youngest volcanoes in the park.

Pinto Basin Road1

Cholla Cactus Garden

Twentynine Palms

Ten acres of teddybear cholla that look soft and are anything but, at the seam between two deserts.

Racetrack Valley Road (dirt, off North Death Valley Highway)1

Racetrack Playa

Stovepipe Wells

A dead-flat lakebed where rocks leave trails behind them, twenty-seven miles down a tire-shredding road.