Places philipldixon Wants to Go

Once a lonely sentinel on the edge of the Great Plains, this rebuilt trading fort offers a glimpse of life on the Santa Fe Trail.

These tall, red sandstone pinnacles outside Moab are often forgotten amid their more famous neighbors.

A ghost town that held steady longer than most, but finally gave up the ghost.

This site is home to ancient petroglyphs and pictographs dating back to 6,000 B.C.

The fifth-longest natural arch in the world, and the longest outside China.

It's safe—and permitted—to walk across these twin natural sandstone arches.

A crack flared at the base provides a pathway completely through a sandstone ridge near Moab.

This raised bulls-eye visible from space was the subject of an intense geologic controversy.

Few things look more out of place than the electric blue ponds in the reddish-brown desert of Utah.

Ancestral Puebloan ruins, natural arches, and box canyons abound in this seldom-visited corner of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park.

Seemingly grown on some other world, these New Mexico rock formations look like a disused science fiction set.

The land is full of geologic eye candy, such as otherworldly spires, mushroom-shaped hoodoos, and prehistoric fossils.

One of the American Southwest's most extensive collections of Navajo rock art.

A glimpse of a waterfall is reached by a steel catwalk along a slot canyon located in an Ouray city park.

This otherwise unremarkable ski town building marks the site of Butch Cassidy's first robbery.

A whimsical roadside community of little metal people.

A well-preserved Ancestral Puebloan ruin tucked beneath a desert cliff.

The graffiti-covered ruins of an abandoned trading post in the middle of the Navajo Nation.

This reclusive Hopi village in Arizona has been continuously populated longer than anywhere else in America.

More than 300 years ago, a revolt at this Hopi pueblo shaped the future of the American Southwest.