Places RouteDown Wants to Go

A beautiful geyser under environmental threat.

This Yellowstone geyser may not shoot as high as the nearby Old Faithful, but it erupts for considerably longer.

Despite his legacy of work in Spain, Cuba, and Florida, the larger-than-life writer's grave is a simple affair tucked in an Idaho cemetery.

Come for the speed, leave in love with the desert.

A 90-foot-tall psychedelic "tree" on the side of the highway has baffled passersby for decades.

Here, at the “world’s longest art gallery,” you’ll find forty miles of ancient petroglyphs and pictographs.

A Mars simulation in the southern Utah desert.

Bizarre lunar-like landscape with thousands of large stone "hoodoos."

This gallery of prehistoric red ochre art lines the wall of a scenic segment in Utah's San Rafael Swell.

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

A breathtaking array of ancient Pueblo structures and artifacts counterintuitively preserved by neglect.

The ancient dwellings of the Puebloans, located in the cliffs of majestic mesas.

The ghostly remains of what was once the world's richest copper mine.

At 238 feet above the bottom of a gorge this span is known as the biggest thrill on the road to McCarthy.

A hulking remnant of Alaska's industrial gold mining boom in the 1920s.

Research missiles and rainbow auroras at the world's largest land-based rocket range.

This small city where almost everyone lives in the same building can only be reached via North America's longest tunnel.

Running under an entire mountain, the longest highway tunnel in North America is kept fresh using portal fans and jet fans.

This frozen tunnel in central Alaska is both an engineering feat and a valuable climate classroom.

This abandoned mine offers a glimpse at what life was like for those who came to Alaska seeking Gold Rush riches.

The stickered marker pinpoints where the only maintained road in the United States crosses into the polar region.

This gravelly, dangerous highway is the only road in the United States that leads to the Arctic Ocean.

This general store is a one-stop-shop for workers at the Prudhoe Bay oil field.

The "Gateway to the Arctic" connects Barrow's indigenous population with the sea and its traditional industry: whaling.