Planning Your Trip

- Orientation
- When to Go
- Statistics
- Getting There
- How to Visit
- Activities
- Park Information
- Lodging
- Related Links

Arches and Canyons

A map of Arches and Canyonlands National Park Area

This Drive Comes From...

National Geographic Driving Guide: Southwest

For more National Geographic travel guides—from Europe to Antarctica and everywhere in between—visit National Geographic Books >>

Nowhere in the American Southwest has wind and water sculptured landscapes more incredibly than in southeastern Utah, where the Colorado and Green Rivers freight loads of silt from the canyonlands to Lake Powell. Stone arcs soar above Arches National Park and Natural Bridges National Monument. Towering hoodoos haunt the sandy basin of Goblin Valley State Park; a geological quirk imprisons the San Juan River in a convoluted chasm. Pueblo ruins at Hovenweep and indecipherable messages chiseled in stone in nearby canyonlands are prehistoric legacies from the ancestral Pueblo people who farmed and hunted the Four Corners area. The Navajo, Hopi, and Ute still farm tribal lands here and sell their wares at vintage trading posts. The Navajo reservation’s Monument Valley, timeless and magnificent, is perhaps the quintessential Southwestern panorama. CONTINUED

- Dead Horse Point State Park
- Arches National Park
- Moab
- Newspaper Rock Recreation Site
- Blanding
- Four Corners Monument
- Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park
- Natural Bridges National Monument
- Goblin Valley State Park

(Continued From Top)

Dead Horse Point State Park

A visitor is dwarfed by a pinnacle at Canyonlands National Park.

Photograph © Marc Muench/Corbis

Traveling south from I-70, the terrain begins to exhibit the erosion that carved this corner of Utah into some of the most captivating bare-rock country in North America. Part of the credit goes to the muddy Colorado River, snaking along 2,000 feet [609.6 meters] below the 5,900-foot [1,799.3-meter] overlooks in Dead Horse Point State Park (+1 435 259 2614. Adm. fee). Stop at the Visitor Center to pick up trail information and ask about ranger-guided walks (evenings May-Sept.). The park’s small museum traces the region’s complicated geological heritage.
The Colorado and Green Rivers corkscrew south through Canyonlands National Park (+1 435 259 7164. Adm. fee), merging at The Confluence and cutting the park into three districts named for their dominant theme: the lofty Island in the Sky mesa; the wilderness of sandstone spires in The Needles; and The Maze, a nearly inaccessible labyrinth of canyons.
From Utah 313 take The Neck entrance road into the park’s Island in the Sky district and Grand View Point Overlook, a deep panorama of red rock sandstone towers, bald mesas, sheer drop-offs, and dead-end canyons far below. The 6,080-foot-high [1,853.2-meter-high] ledge plummets 1,200 feet [356.8 meters] to the rim of Monument Basin, where rock towers rise 300 feet [91.4 meters]. For a glimpse of the Green River’s placid flow through Stillwater Canyon, backtrack to the Upheaval Dome turnoff and take the gravel road to the Green River Overlook.
There’s a tree-shaded picnic spot at the end of the road to Upheaval Dome. The mile-wide, 1,500-foot-deep [457.2-meter-deep] crater is either the eroded core of a primordial salt dome or a meteor impact crater. On the way back to the highway, stop and take the easy half-mile [0.8-kilometer] loop trail to Mesa Arch, which passes through a magical little forest of gnarled juniper and pinyon.

Arches National Park

Landscape Arch, on the Devil’s Garden Trail, is one of the park’s most stunning sights.

Photograph © Tom Bean/Corbis

Entrances to the separate districts of Canyonlands National Park are widely spread apart. Between them is perhaps the crown jewel of the 20-plus national parks and monuments on the Colorado Plateau, the utterly unique Arches National Park (+1 435 259 8161. Adm. fee). There are some 2,000 free-standing red sandstone arcs here, along with towers, fins, balanced rocks, and buttes flanking the 18-mile [29-kilometer] Arches Scenic Drive from the park entrance off US 191. Stop at the Visitor Center for self-guiding tour information and a slide show previewing the formations—and put on your walking shoes. Trails to some of the most spectacular arches range from five-minute ambles in The Windows section to the Devil’s Garden Trail, snaking 2.25 miles [3.6 kilometers] away from the end of the drive to seven major spans. Sinuously graceful, 306-foot [93.3-meter]-long Landscape Arch, among the world’s longest, is less than a mile’s [1.6 kilometer’s] stroll from the trailhead.
Some Colorado River runners use Potash Road (Utah 279) to reach their launching points. Its first few miles offer a close-up of archetypal Canyonlands rock formations rising along the curving route. Continue past The Portal, where the Colorado cuts a notch in the sandstone and shale cliffs. About 3 miles [4.8 kilometers] farther on your right, a sign announces “Indian Petroglyphs.” Fixed viewscopes study a crowd of ancient stone drawings chipped into a sandstone cliff face by people who began to farm and hunt in these red canyons about 2,000 years ago. Continue to a sign pointing right to “Dinosaur Tracks.” Geologic uplift has turned a piece of mudflat toward another set of fixed viewscopes focused on the three-toed footprints.

Moab

Moab Slickrock Bicycle Trail

Photograph © Danny Lehman

Mormon pioneers named Moab (Visitor Center +1 435 259 8825 or 800 635 MOAB) in 1880 after an Old Testament kingdom near the Promised Land. Today it quietly booms as a full-time base camp for adventuring, with outfitters specializing in river trips and mountain biking; bookstores stocked with topo maps; fossil, gem, and mineral shops; and Native American craft outlets.

Newspaper Rock Recreation Site

Petroglyphs, Newspaper Rock Recreation Site

Photograph © Danny Lehman

By now you might think you’ve seen every kind of rock formation possible. Not so—not until you’ve seen The Needles district in Canyonlands National Park. En route you’ll pass an extraordinary concentration of Native American petroglyphs at Newspaper Rock Recreation Site, where the base of a sandstone wall is crowded with symbols, some 15 centuries old.

The Needles district is named for the bewildering maze of weathered, red-and-yellow-banded sandstone spires rising above mesas and flat-floored valleys. A three minute stroll from the Roadside Ruin pullout leads to a beehive-shaped granary beneath a ledge, where corn harvested over 700 years ago was stored by ancestral Puebloans. They carried pots along the three-fifths of a mile [1-kilometer] trail to Pothole Point to collect the water that pools here in stone depressions. Take Elephant Hill road for distinctive panoramas and the shady picnic area at its end.

Blanding
An irrigation project begun in 1921 enabled Blanding to earn a living growing grain and hay; before then it got by as a place where local ranchers traded cattle. Long before that—for five centuries, beginning around A.D. 750—Anasazi lived here in a village partially excavated and restored at 17-acre [6.9-hectare] Edge of the Cedars State Park (660 W. 400 North. +1 435 678 2238. Adm. fee). A museum focuses on the Anasazi and the Ute and Navajo who followed them. The Shumway Collection of Anasazi pottery on the second floor is one of the finest in the Southwest.
Blanding has a reputation for Native American art and handicrafts (ceramics in particular), sold in galleries and shops around town. Members of both tribes work while you watch at Cedar Mesa Pottery (333 S. Main St. +1 435 678 2241. Tours Mon.-Fri.). Huck’s Museum and Trading Post (Utah 191. +1 435 678 2329. Adm. fee), on the southern fringe of town, has a small but impressive artifacts collection.

Hovenweep National Monument

Photograph © Danny Lehman

Once you’ve seen the country surrounding Hovenweep National Monument (+1 970 529 4461) you won’t be surprised to learn that Hovenweep is a Ute term meaning “deserted valley.” From about the 5th century A.D. to the 13th, the six-village community straddling the Utah-Colorado border was an ancestral Puebloan metropolis. One of the least visited national monuments, the ruins are unique among Great Pueblo Period settlements because of their unusual square, circular, and D-shaped towers. There’s strong evidence that these towers, resembling tiny castles and fortresslike in appearance, were used for solar observation—a skill of great importance to agrarian tribes. A 2-mile [3.2-kilometer] loop trail wanders among dwellings and granaries in the Tower Group near the Visitor Center. (Rangers recommend early morning walks in summer, before temperatures rise.) An 8-mile [12.9-kilometer] round-trip trail follows a sandy dry wash to three other groups of ruins among pinyon and juniper. You can drive to all with a high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicle. Before taking any hike, however, discuss your plans with a ranger on duty.

Four Corners Monument
Enjoy the open beauty of the countryside as you drive southeast into Colorado and then southwest to the Four Corners Monument (Adm. fee), the only spot in the U.S. where four states meet. Many travelers assume awkward positions in order to touch all four simultaneously; you may have to wait your turn.
The drive west reenters the Navajo Indian Reservation and red rock country, crossing open range and farming country punctuated with circular, log-built, dirt-roofed hogans. Keep a watchful eye out for children herding goats and sheep along the roadway. Some of that wool is likely to end up at the trading post at Teec Nos Pos (Junction of US 160 and US 64. +1 520 656 3224), where four generations of tribal artisans and sheep herders have exchanged handmade rugs, blankets, jewelry, and raw wool. Beautifully intricate rugs have been sold here since 1905.

The stretch of road across Monument Valley between Kayenta and Mexican Hat is the kind of journey that sets auto touring apart from any other kind of travel, creating an intimate sense of personal discovery and adventure that lingers long after the suitcases, sunscreen, and binoculars have been put away. About 15 miles [24 kilometers] north of Kayenta, colossal sandstone buttes and mesas rise up from the sand and sagebrush plain and march toward you, glinting yellow, red, and orange against a vivid sky.

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park
One mile [1.6 kilometers] into Utah, take Reservation Road 42B for 4 miles [6.4 kilometers] to the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park (+1 435 727 3353. Adm. fee), a concession area surrounding an intersection of roads. Keep going to the Visitor Center and the start of an unpaved 17-mile [27.4-kilometer] loop trail. Pick up a self-guiding booklet before you take the drive out across the tawny desert to some of the more than 40 pinnacles. Capped by hard rock that protected the underlying softer sediments from erosion, these monoliths were created over the last 1.5 million years. The park encloses at least 100 archaeological sites. John Ford Point, about 3.5 miles [5.6 kilometers] in, commemorates the great Irish-American director (born Sean O’Feeney) who from 1917 to his death in 1973 made 125 films and here filmed many Westerns (Stagecoach, The Searchers) with his friend John Wayne.
In primordial times the San Juan River flowed slowly back and forth across an uneven landscape near Mexican Hat. The basin tilted, accelerating the river’s flow enough to increase the rate of erosion along its original course of tight S-turns through sedimentary rock. This cut a zig-zag course of entrenched meanders in 1,000-foot-deep [304.8-meter-deep] San Juan River Canyon at Goosenecks State Park (4 miles [6.4 kilometers] off Utah 261. +1 435 678 2238). Here the river travels 5 miles [8 kilometers] for every mile [1.6 kilometers] of forward progress.

Natural Bridges National Monument

Non-native bison, near Hanksville

Photograph © Farrell Grehen

Normally, geology changes with imperceptible slowness. In 1992, however, part of the 225-million-year-old landscape at Natural Bridges National Monument (+1 435 692 1234. Adm. fee) changed quickly when 4,000 tons [4,064.2 metric tons] of rock fell from Kachina Bridge, one of three white sandstone spans carved by streams coursing through the pinyon and juniper canyons here. Named by the Hopi, the Kachina, Sipapu, and Owachomo Bridges are among the Southwest’s largest over-water bridges: Sipapu is the second-largest natural bridge in the world. A 9-mile [14.5-kilometer] loop drive takes you past all three; trails drop from viewpoints to the canyon floor and the bridges. The 0.6-mile [1-kilometer] Horsecollar Ruins Overlook Trail, beginning just past the Sipapu viewpoint, hugs a vertical cliff face to spy on Anasazi cliff dwellings abandoned in the late 13th century. Natural Bridges National Monument was established in 1908 after an article on the area in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC helped spur Teddy Roosevelt to action.
Lake Powell reservoir began to fill in 1963 when the Glen Canyon Dam blocked the Colorado 186 miles [299.3 kilometers] to the southwest. The second largest man-made lake in the U.S., it is the heart of the 125-million-acre [50.6-million-hectare] Glen Canyon National Recreation Area (Bullfrog Marina Visitor Center +1 435 684 2243). The recreation came at a price: The nearly 200-mile-long [321.9-kilometer-long] lake drowned some of the most exquisite scenery in North America, despite protests by thousands.

Goblin Valley State Park
The barren bowl containing Goblin Valley State Park (+1 435 564 3633. Adm. fee) was named for its oddly shaped formations and balanced rocks that locals call mushrooms, hoodoos, knobs, gnomes, stone babies—and goblins. Some reach 200 feet [61 meters], composed of sandstone, mudstone, and siltstone sculptured by water and abrasive sandy winds. The 12-mile [19.3-kilometer] access road includes 7 miles [11.3 kilometers] of dirt that’s dusty but well-maintained. A 1-mile [1.6-kilometer] paved park road approaches some of the most impressive red-and-white-banded goblins, and two walking trails wander across the desert to meet other formations.