Road trips from Southern California: Utah
Cedar Breaks National Monument is closed from October through late May because of heavy snowfall, but the rest of the year, it’s a stellar place to visit, and views of the spectacular 3-mile long, 2,000-foot-deep, naturally occurring “amphitheater” are available all year long. (Jerel Harris / Los Angeles Times)
Zion’s many multicolored canyons, mesas and towers frame its first-rate scenery. The park’s most popular formation is Zion Canyon. Besides camping sites, Zion Lodge offers rooms, cabins, suites and a restaurant.
(Trent Nelson / Associated Press)
This stretch of south-central Utah could well have turned up in a John Ford movie. Interstate 70 cuts right through the area about 75 miles long and 40 miles wide, offering sweeping views of this land of spires, arches, narrow canyons and gorges. (Paul Foy / Associated Press)
Lush greens set amid black lava rocks and red sandstone cliffs make St. George one of the more scenic desert golf destinations in the country. But there’s another equally alluring draw: the value. (Ron Cobb / McClatchy-Tribune)
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A look through the Mesa Arch, perched on the edge of a 600-foot canyon drop-off in Utahs Canyonlands, reveals stunning canyons, mountains and plateaus. Travel in the spring to avoid late-summer monsoons or winter snowfall. (Ravell Call / AP)
I went on to Lake Powell’s confluence with the Escalante. Along the way, we passed Hole-in-the-Rock Arch, where Mormon pioneers cut a treacherously steep wagon trail from the plateau above to the river in 1880. (Bettina Boxall / Los Angeles Times)
Arches National Park features more than 2,000 sandstone arches carved by millions of years of erosion. Prominent formations in the park include Delicate Arch, Balanced Rock and Landscape Arch. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
The “Spiral Jetty” sculpture, a 1,500-foot-long coil stretching into the lake, was created from basalt and earth by artist Robert Smithson in 1970 during a long drought. It became submerged a few years later when lake levels rose again. In 1999, it resurfaced. (Tom Smart / For The Times)
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The Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry in Cleveland, Utah has the densest concentration of Jurassic bones ever found.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Head to Salt Lake City to the Salt Lake Tabernacle at Temple Square, completed in 1867. Its dome is 150 feet wide and without center supports. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir performs in the Salt Lake Tabernacle. That’s the tabernacles famous pipe organ in the background. (Steve C. Wilson / Associated Press)
The morally ambiguous 1969 movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” struck a chord with Vietnam War-era audiences who stood and cheered when Paul Newman as Butch and Robert Redford as Sundance met a hail of bullets in a dusty Bolivian town.
(Susan Spano / Los Angeles Times)
No traveler’s wanderings across the U.S. are complete without a trip to this isolated plateau. The shimmering red-rock buttes rising from the mile-high valley floor form a skyline as unique and memorable as that of Manhattan, and stand at the center of American iconography and culture.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
