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National Parks

The national parks and monuments the rivers run through — Canyonlands, Arches, Dinosaur, Glen Canyon and the rest of the corridor.

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All National Parks & Monuments

14 units across the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin.

  • Arches National ParkUT
    76,000 acres of sandstone arches, fins, and balanced rock north of Moab — the densest concentration on Earth.
  • Bryce Canyon National ParkUT
    A rim, not a canyon: the largest concentration of hoodoos on Earth, on the edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau.
  • Canyonlands National ParkUT
    Utah's largest park, cut by the Colorado and the Green into four districts — Island in the Sky, the Needles, the Maze, and the rivers themselves.
  • Capitol Reef National ParkUT
    A hundred-mile wrinkle in the crust, a Mormon orchard at its centre, and a county with no stoplights.
  • Cedar Breaks National MonumentUT
    A half-mile-deep amphitheatre of pink and orange Claron rock, on a plateau rim above 10,000 feet.
  • Dinosaur National MonumentUT, CO
    Straddling the Utah–Colorado line along the Green and the Yampa: famous quarry, defining whitewater.
  • Flaming Gorge National Recreation AreaUT, WY
    Powell named it in 1869 for the burning cliffs. Now a 91-mile reservoir across the Utah–Wyoming line, with the Green River running out the bottom of the dam.
  • Glen Canyon National Recreation AreaUT, AZ
    A million and a quarter acres from Lees Ferry to the Orange Cliffs, and the reservoir everyone comes for is barely a tenth of it.
  • Grand Staircase-Escalante National MonumentUT
    Nearly 1.9 million BLM acres of slickrock, slot canyons, and the Escalante drainage — with boundaries still politically contested.
  • Great Basin National ParkNV
    The Snake Range rising out of Nevada's sagebrush ocean — Wheeler Peak at 13,063 feet, bristlecone pines, and the marble chambers of Lehman Caves.
  • Hovenweep National MonumentUT, CO
    Six small units strung along the Utah–Colorado line, holding thousand-year-old towers — one of them built as a solar calendar.
  • Natural Bridges National MonumentUT
    Three sandstone bridges over White Canyon — and, in 2007, the first International Dark Sky Park anywhere in the world.
  • Timpanogos Cave National MonumentUT
    Three small caves in American Fork Canyon: 250 acres that are essentially a canyon wall, a trail, and what's inside it.
  • Zion National ParkUT
    Utah's first national park: 2,000-foot Navajo Sandstone above the Virgin River, in a canyon the shuttle is the only way into.