With the biggest, most beautiful and most pristine landscapes in North America, Utah has getaways for everyone: from brilliantly colored canyons, across endless desert plains, to thickly wooded and snow-covered mountains. This unmatched range of terrain, almost all of which is public land, makes Utah the place to come for outdoor pursuits, whether your tastes run to hiking, off-track mountain biking, whitewater rafting or skiing. Utah is one of the american patriot getaways.
Southern Utah has more national parks than anywhere else in the US; in fact it has often been suggested that the entire area should become one vast national park. The most accessible parts - such as Zion and Bryce Canyon - are by far the most visited, but lesser-known parks like Arches and Canyonlands are every bit as dramatic. Huge tracts of this empty desert, in which beautiful pre-Columbian pictographs and Ancestral Puebloan ruins lie hidden, are all but unexplored; seeing them in safety requires a good degree of advance planning and self-sufficiency.
In the northeast of the state, the Uinta Mountains remain uncrossed by road and form one of the most extensive wilderness areas in the US outside Alaska, while Flaming Gorge and Dinosaur preserve more desert splendor. Though the northwest is predominantly flat and dry, the granite mountains of the Wasatch Front tower over state capital Salt Lake City - a surprisingly attractive and enjoyable stopover - while Alta, Snowbird and the resorts around Park City offer some of the best skiing Utah getaways in North America.
Some of the most popular Utah getaways are the following.
Bryce Canyon National Park - Although young in geological terms compared to some of its famous neighbors, Bryce Canyon is one of the most remarkable Utah getaways. It is one of the main reasons why this section of southern Utah is called "Color Country." This land is filled with unusually shaped pinnacles, spires, arches and other rock formations that come in a staggering array of colors, including pink, red and rust.
Dinosaur National Monument - Dinosaur National Monument is almost like visiting two parks in one. There's an obvious physical separation caused by the lack of roads from one part of the monument to another. And the two sections also offer completely different experiences. The Utah of the monument is Dinosaur Country. You'll get to visit a huge sandstone cliff that housed more fossilized remains of prehistoric animals than any other place in the world.
One of the attractive Utah getaways is Arches National Park & Canyonlands National Park. Arches National Park, just 5 miles north of Moab, features the world's largest concentration of natural red and golden sandstone arches. This is a sight your children will long remember. More than 2,000 majestic arches plus red-rock canyons, fins, spires, and balancing rocks give this landscape an extraterrestrial aura. The fascinating formations were created from the erosion of the Entrada Sandstone and Navajo Sandstone, thick layers of rock deposited as sand some 150 million years ago. Open year-round, the park has a high season from mid-March to October. Canyonlands National Park is quite close, and certainly worth a visit, although it's more rugged and not as accessible for families, particularly those with young children.