Year-Round
Some places don't have a wrong season, only a different one. These stops stay open and worth the drive whether you catch them under snow, spring runoff, summer glare, or autumn gold — a hot spring, a museum, a town that lives year-round, a canyon that simply changes clothes. The West rewards the off-season traveler: fewer people, softer light, and rooms you can actually book. Come when it suits you; these will be here.
I-5 / US-501
US-62
Scenic Byway 123
Scenic Byway 12 / UT-241
Scenic Byway 12 / UT-631
I-1510
Beaver
A charming main street town with surprisingly good food
Hill Aerospace Museum
Over 90 military aircraft displayed indoors and on the tarmac
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
Nephi
A quiet ranching town at the foot of Mount Nebo
Ogden Union Station
A grand 1924 train depot turned museum complex
Parowan Gap Petroglyphs
An ancient rock art gallery hidden in a desert canyon
Scipio
A tiny crossroads town where I-15 meets the old highway
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 (Ghost Town Road exit)1
I-15 / I-40 / Historic Route 661
I-15 / I-701
I-15 / SR-138 / Historic Route 661
I-191
UT-241
US-402
CA-49 / CA-202
US-503
Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush
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
Ely
The copper town and crossroads at the east end of the loneliest road — home of the Ghost Train and the gateway to Great Basin
Grimes Point
Hundreds of desert-varnished boulders carved over eight thousand years — the Great Basin's most accessible rock art
US-50 & US-3951
Historic Route 662
Grand Canyon Caverns
The largest dry cavern in the country, 210 feet under Route 66 — a Cold War fallout shelter, the deepest hotel room in America, and a Hualapai burial place the tourists once mistook for a sideshow.
Hackberry General Store
Looks like a junkyard, is a shrine — the 1934 store an artist brought back from the dead, and the Route 66 stop that inspired Fillmore in Cars.
Historic Route 66 (Colorado Blvd.)1
Historic Route 66 (Foothill Blvd.)1
Historic Route 66 (Mt. Vernon Ave.)1
Historic Route 66 terminus area1
Off Historic Route 66 (Foothill/Colorado alignment)1
I-806
Carlin & the Carlin Trend
The small railroad town west of Elko that sits beside the largest gold complex on earth — and, because the gold is invisible, shows you almost none of it.
Elko
The railroad built it, cattle made it, and gold keeps it — the working capital of northeast Nevada, a frontier cow town that never got around to becoming a relic.
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
Winnemucca
The crossing town at the western end of the Humboldt — Basque tables, a 1900 bank robbery the town still pins on Butch Cassidy, and the spot where I-80 meets US-95.
I-80 / Donner Pass Road1
US-896
Bear Lake
The Caribbean of the Rockies — a turquoise lake straddling the Utah-Idaho border
Best Friends Animal Sanctuary
The largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States
Big Rock Candy Mountain
The real mountain that inspired the famous hobo folk song
Kanab
Little Hollywood — where hundreds of Western movies were filmed
Manti Temple
A striking pioneer-era temple crowning a hilltop above the Sanpete Valley
Panguitch
A well-preserved pioneer town and gateway to Bryce Canyon
US-89 / US-61
US-89 / US-911
US-89 / UT-91
US-932
US-953
CA-111 / I-101
UT-1131
UT-1502
US-1633
NV-1691
US-1891
Dantes View Road (off CA-190)1
US-1916
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
Hole N the Rock
A 5,000-square-foot home carved inside a massive sandstone boulder
Moab
The adventure capital of the American Southwest
Wilson Arch
A stunning natural arch visible right from the highway
NV-2061
UT-2111
UT-2242
UT-2791
UT-3161
NV-3411
US-3953
Bishop
The Eastern Sierras working capital, and the home of the Nüümü who were traded out of their own valley.
Manzanar National Historic Site
A concentration camp on twice-taken ground, where the United States imprisoned more than eleven thousand of its own.
Stewart Indian School
The federal boarding school that took Great Basin children from 1890 to 1980 to erase their cultures—its student-built stone campus now a tribally-guided museum telling the story in alumni voices