Moab & Southeastern Utah

Photo: Chris Marlow, Fodors.com Member

Moab & Southeastern Utah Travel Guide

The first thing travelers to southeastern Utah notice is the color. Red, orange, purple, pink, creamy ivory, deep chocolate, and even shades of turquoise paint the landscape. Rocks jut and tilt first one way, then another. There's no flat canvas of color in this country, and near-vertical walls stand in the way of easy route-finding. Deep canyons, carved by wild Western rivers, crisscross the area. Rocks teeter on slim columns or burst like mushrooms from the ground. Snowcapped mountains stand in the distant horizon no matter which direction you look. The sky is more often than not blue in a region that receives only about eight inches of rain a year. When thunderstorms do build, the sky turns a dramatic gunmetal gray, bringing deep orange cliffs into sharp relief.

Embroidered through the region is evidence of the people who came before modern-day rock climbers and Mormons. Rock art as old as 4,000 years is etched or painted on canyon walls. The most familiar of these ancient dwellers are the Ancestral Puebloans, popularly known as Anasazi, who occupied the area between 700 and 2,000 years ago.

In modern-day southeastern Utah, Moab has become one of the state's liveliest small towns and the gateway to Arches and Canyonlands national parks. Surrounding the town, the area's unique and colorful geology calls out to mountain bikers, who love to ride over the humps of slickrock that act like natural highways in the wilderness. Thousands more take four-wheel-drive vehicles into the backcountry to drive the challenging network of roads left from mining days. Still others flock to the shores of the Colorado River, where they set out in rafts to tackle some of the largest white-water rapids in the country. With so many things to do, Moab has become a major tourist destination in the Southwest.