Utah Untamed
Hidden Gems
Roadside oddities, ghost towns, and only-in-Utah spots.
The Utah Waterfall That Used to Have a Restaurant on Top of It
Bridal Veil Falls in Provo Canyon is a 607-foot double cataract you can walk right up to on a paved trail. For 35 years, a cliffside tram climbed beside it to a restaurant and dance hall that burned, slid, and finally came down for good.
Goosenecks State Park: Where the San Juan River Goes Six Miles to Get One and a Half
At Goosenecks State Park, you stand a thousand feet above the San Juan River and watch it wind more than six miles through three stacked canyon loops just to move a mile and a half downstream — the finest entrenched meander on Earth, for five dollars a car.
The Sea-Monkeys Were Real, and They Came From Utah
The Sea-Monkeys from the back of the comic book were brine shrimp, and the Great Salt Lake supplies close to 45% of the world's wild supply — a $60-million winter harvest that feeds fish farms from Norway to Ecuador.
Rainbow Bridge: The Largest Natural Bridge on Earth Is in Utah, and the Lake That Floats You There Is Backing Away
Rainbow Bridge rises 290 feet over a desert creek at the foot of Navajo Mountain, sacred to six Native nations and once reachable only by a multi-day pack trip. Lake Powell made it a boat ride — and now the lake is pulling back.
The Bingham Canyon Mine: The Largest Hole Humans Have Ever Dug
The Bingham Canyon Mine, 25 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, is the largest human-made excavation on earth — a pit three-quarters of a mile deep and two and a half miles across, visible to the naked eye from orbit.
Antelope Island: Utah's Free-Roaming Bison, the Float That Beats the Dead Sea, and the Lake Shrinking Around It
Antelope Island is the largest island in the Great Salt Lake — 42 square miles of grassland and beach with one of the oldest publicly owned bison herds in the country roaming free. Here's the deep guide: what's true, what's worth your time, and what the falling lake is doing to all of it.
Is Goblin Valley Worth Visiting? A Field Guide to Utah's Valley of a Thousand Stone Goblins
Goblin Valley is one of the few parks in Utah where the whole point is to leave the trail and get lost on purpose. Three square miles of mushroom-shaped sandstone goblins, no marked path, and a sky dark enough to see the Milky Way after the crowds leave.
You Can Pick Your Own Fruit Inside a Utah National Park
Capitol Reef National Park lets you pick and eat fruit straight off the trees in its historic Fruita orchards, and you pay for what you carry out on the honor system. Roughly 1,900 heirloom trees, planted by pioneers starting in 1880, are still watered by the ditches they dug.
The Backyard Sphinx: Inside Gilgal, Utah's Strangest Garden
There is a 25-ton stone sphinx wearing the face of Joseph Smith sitting in the middle of Salt Lake City, tucked behind a row of houses. Gilgal Sculpture Garden is the only place Utah officially recognizes as a "visionary art environment" — and it's free.
Hole N" The Rock: The 5,000-Square-Foot Home One Man Blasted Into a Moab Cliff
Hole N" The Rock is a 5,000-square-foot home with fourteen rooms carved directly into a solid sandstone cliff on US-191, about 12 miles south of Moab. A local named Albert Christensen spent twelve years drilling and blasting the rooms out by hand.
Bryce Canyon's Hoodoos Are Carved by Ice — and There Are More Here Than Anywhere on Earth
Bryce Canyon's hoodoos are formed by frost wedging: water seeps into cracks in the rock, freezes overnight, expands, and slowly pries the stone apart. Because the rim freezes and thaws more than 200 times a year, it happens here faster and more relentlessly than almost anywhere in the country.
Why Half of the Great Salt Lake Is Pink — and the Railroad That Made It That Way
The Great Salt Lake is pink on its northern half because a rock-fill railroad causeway cut the lake in two in 1959, and the northern half — starved of fresh river water ever since — grew salty enough to turn a rose-to-wine pink from salt-loving microbes.
Fantasy Canyon: Utah's 10-Acre Rock Garden of Melted-Looking Stone
Fantasy Canyon is a roughly ten-acre pocket of bizarrely eroded sandstone about 27 miles south of Vernal, where a half-mile loop trail winds past more than twenty named rock formations that look less carved than poured.
Utah's "Mars Marbles": The Rusty Desert Spheres That Helped NASA Read Water on Another Planet
Moqui marbles are small, dark, iron-rich balls of sandstone scattered by the thousands across southern Utah's slickrock. They look so much like the "blueberries" a NASA rover found on Mars in 2004 that geologists now study the Utah versions to understand how water once moved across the Red Planet.
The Bonneville Salt Flats: America's Fastest Ground, and the Race to Save It
A 30,000-acre sheet of hard white salt west of the Great Salt Lake is the fastest natural ground in America — the place where drivers have chased the world land speed record for nearly a century. Here's how it formed, when to catch the mirror, and why the salt is running out.
Cedar Breaks: Utah's Highest Amphitheater, and the One Most People Drive Straight Past
Cedar Breaks is built from the same rainbow rock as Bryce Canyon, sits about 2,000 feet higher, and draws a fraction of the crowd — a half-mile-deep stone amphitheater above 10,000 feet that's buried in snow half the year and thick with wildflowers the other half.
The Sun Tunnels: Utah's Other Great Earthwork, and How to Find It
Everyone knows the Spiral Jetty. Ninety minutes deeper into the Great Basin sit Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels — four 22-ton concrete cylinders built in 1976 to frame the solstice sun and, at midday, throw constellations of light across their own walls.
Kolob Canyons: The Half of Zion Almost Nobody Drives To
Zion has a second entrance off I-15, 40 miles north of the main canyon — no shuttle, no timed-entry, a fraction of the crowd, and a back-country arch that spent decades billed as the longest on Earth until somebody measured it.
Homestead Crater: The Warm-Water Hot Spring Hidden Inside a Utah Limestone Dome
A 65-foot-deep geothermal spring sealed inside a 55-foot beehive of limestone in Midway — the only warm-water scuba certification site in the continental U.S., and one of the strangest swims in Utah.
Coral Pink Sand Dunes: Utah's Pink-Sand Playground, and How to Do It Right
3,730 acres of genuinely rose-colored sand you can surf on a rented board, between Kanab and Mount Carmel Junction — home to a beetle found nowhere else on Earth, and dangerously hot by summer noon.
Pando: The 106-Acre Utah Forest That's Secretly One Tree — and the Heaviest Living Thing on Earth
What looks like a stand of 47,000 aspens by Fish Lake is a single tree sharing one root system — the heaviest known living organism on Earth. And it's quietly dying.
Nine Mile Canyon Is the World's Longest Art Gallery — and It's Hiding in Eastern Utah
An estimated 1,000 rock art sites and more than 10,000 images line a remote 40-mile canyon in eastern Utah. Here's what's on the walls, who made them, and how to see it.
Spiral Jetty, Where Land Art Meets the Great Salt Lake
A 1,500-foot coil of basalt and salt crystal on a remote north shore — one of the most famous artworks almost nobody visits.
The Secret Slot Canyons of Escalante
Escape the crowds and navigate the narrow, sculpted walls of these lesser-known geological wonders.