The Most Beautiful Canyons and Gorges in the United States
12 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful canyons and gorges in the United States are Grand Canyon, Horseshoe Bend and Waimea Canyon State Park. The list covers 12 canyons and gorges. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The American West is the world's great canyon country. On the Colorado Plateau, a thick stack of nearly flat sedimentary layers was lifted slowly as a block while rivers kept their courses, so the Colorado, the Green and their tributaries cut straight down instead of wandering. A dry climate keeps the walls sharp and bare, and every band of colour is a different chapter of geological time. Volcanic rock, hydrothermal alteration and tropical rain add very different canyons elsewhere in the country.
The Grand Canyon is roughly a mile deep, and its walls expose rocks close to two billion years old at the bottom. Nearby, Horseshoe Bend is a single tight meander of the Colorado, while Antelope Canyon and Buckskin Gulch are slot canyons in Navajo Sandstone, cut by flash floods so narrow that light reaches the floor only in beams. Canyon de Chelly, on Navajo land, shelters ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings and the sandstone spire of Spider Rock.
Further north, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison is so steep and narrow that parts of its floor see only minutes of direct sunlight a day, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone owes its yellow walls to hot water that altered volcanic rhyolite. Waimea Canyon on Kauai cuts red earth and green ridges, Watkins Glen in New York stacks waterfalls in a short shale gorge, Fern Canyon in California is lined with ferns from top to bottom, and Santa Elena Canyon carries the Rio Grande between sheer limestone walls.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Grand Canyon | Canyon | |
| 2 | Horseshoe Bend | Canyon | |
| 3 | Waimea Canyon State Park | Canyon | |
| 4 | Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone | Canyon | |
| 5 | Canyon de Chelly National Monument | Canyon | |
| 6 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | |
| 7 | Antelope Canyon | Canyon | |
| 8 | Buckskin Gulch | Canyon | |
| 9 | Waipiʻo Valley | Canyon | |
| 10 | Watkins Glen State Park | Canyon | |
| 11 | Fern Canyon | Canyon | |
| 12 | Santa Elena Canyon | Canyon |
01 Grand Canyon
United States36.097° N 112.095° W
Image by balder815 from Pixabay Walking below the rim is the best way to feel the canyon's scale, but it is also where visitors get into trouble. Temperatures at the river often pass 38°C in summer, while the rims can be snowbound in winter. Park rangers advise against hiking to the river and back in one day, and every year people have to be rescued. Any overnight stay below the rim requires a backcountry permit, and demand far exceeds supply. Mule trips and multi-day rafting trips on the Colorado are the other classic ways down.
Did you know? Cárdenas’s soldiers, who climbed a third of the way down in 1540, reported rocks taller than the Giralda tower of Seville.
02 Horseshoe Bend
United States36.879° N 111.514° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay Light changes the place through the day. In the middle of the day the river is lit to the bottom and its colour is strongest; at sunrise and sunset the butte casts long shadows and the sandstone glows. The bend lies within Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and draws more than two million visitors a year, most of whom come for this one view.
Did you know? The Navajo Sandstone still covers some 100,000 square miles of the Southwest, and its original sand sea may have been two and a half times larger.
03 Waimea Canyon State Park
United States · 31.8 km from Līhuʻe22.056° N 159.665° W
Image by TeamHealthy808 from Pixabay The canyon's shape owes as much to structural collapse as to erosion. Geologists trace part of its form to a large fault-block downdrop tied to the volcanic history of Kauaʻi's shield volcano, on top of which the relentless runoff from Waiʻaleʻale's summit kept carving for millions of years afterward.
Did you know? Lava flows on the canyon's two sides differ: thick, flat-lying layers to the east and thin, westward-tilted ones to the west, split by a huge fault.
04 Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
United States44.717° N 110.497° W
Brocken Inaglory · CC BY-SA 3.0 Overlooks line both rims, and short, steep paths lead down to the brink of the Lower Falls and to a stairway descending into the canyon. The Canyon Visitor Education Center at Canyon Village explains Yellowstone's volcanic system, with a room-sized relief model of the park.
Did you know? Its V-shaped profile shows it was carved by the river rather than by glaciers, even though ice sheets covered the area several times.
05 Canyon de Chelly National Monument
United States36.155° N 109.509° W
Image by ducken99 from Pixabay The most photographed sight is Spider Rock, a twin sandstone spire rising around 800 feet from the junction of Canyon de Chelly and Monument Canyon; Navajo tradition holds that Spider Woman lives on its summit. Look also for the White House Ruin, a two-level cliff dwelling with one part on the valley floor and another tucked into an alcove some fifty feet above, and for Antelope House and Mummy Cave in Canyon del Muerto. The canyon's history has darker pages too: a Spanish expedition under Antonio Narbona attacked the Navajo here in 1805, and Kit Carson's campaign of 1863–64 drove them from the canyon on the forced march to Bosque Redondo.
Did you know? During the Spanish attack of 1805 led by Antonio Narbona, 115 Navajo were killed and 33 taken captive.
06 Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
United States · 16.6 km from Montrose38.580° N 107.728° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by misterfarmer from Pixabay For the bold, the inner canyon can be reached by steep, unmaintained routes that are serious undertakings, while the paved East Portal Road, with a 16 percent grade, descends to the river at the canyon's upstream end. Sunrise and late evening, when light slides briefly down the walls, are the moments to stand at the edge.
Did you know? Twenty-six workers died building the Gunnison Tunnel, and President William Howard Taft travelled to Colorado to dedicate it in September 1909.
07 Antelope Canyon
United States36.858° N 111.372° W
Image by Lenzatic from Pixabay For the Navajo people the canyon was never just scenery. Guides who lead tours through it also carry stories tied to the place — its winds, its light, the sense of a living, breathing landform — that predate the crowds by generations and are worth listening to as more than commentary.
Did you know? The area actually contains six separate slot canyon sections: Upper Antelope (The Crack), Rattlesnake, Owl, Mountain Sheep, Canyon X and Lower Antelope (The Corkscrew).
08 Buckskin Gulch
United States37.002° N 111.866° W
Image by igormattio from Pixabay Most people enter Buckskin through Wire Pass, a short side canyon that Coyote Wash has carved through the ridge known as The Cockscomb; other routes begin at the Buckskin, White House and Lees Ferry trailheads. The canyon's form is a record of the force that shaped it. The surrounding country is largely bare slickrock, and even a quarter of an inch of rain can run off it and send a flash flood through the narrows. The canyon is managed as wilderness, and both day and overnight trips require permits issued by the Bureau of Land Management.
Did you know? Flood-borne logs have been found wedged between the walls some 40 feet above the canyon floor.
09 Waipiʻo Valley
United States20.120° N 155.593° W
Image by SocialButterflyMMG from Pixabay The road that descends from the lookout on the southern rim is among the steepest public roads anywhere: it drops about 800 feet in 0.6 miles, averaging a 25 percent grade and reaching 45 percent in places, and it is open only to four-wheel-drive vehicles.
Did you know? Līloa's son ʻUmi-a-Līloa, who united Hawaiʻi Island, was remembered as the "husbandman king" for laying out large taro patches in the valley.
10 Watkins Glen State Park
United States · 32.3 km from Elmira42.377° N 76.872° W
Flickr user: Peter Rivera Stamford, Connecticut https://www.flickr.com/people/riverap1/ · CC BY 2.0 The glen was first opened to visitors in 1863 by Morvalden Ells, a newspaper editor from Vermont, as a private attraction. After years of negotiation it passed into public ownership in 1906 and became a state park, today one of the most visited in New York's Finger Lakes region.
Did you know? Nearly 1.4 million visitors walked through the park in 2025, a remarkable crowd for a gorge barely two miles long.
11 Fern Canyon
United States41.403° N 124.068° W
NPS Photo · Public domain The canyon lies in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, in Humboldt County, close to the open sands of Gold Bluffs Beach, where gold was found in 1851 and a short-lived mining camp once stood. This is the homeland of the Yurok people. The canyon itself passed to the state in 1965, when the Pacific Lumber Company donated it as part of a deal that added 2,125 acres to the park. Prairie Creek is now managed jointly with Redwood National Park and neighbouring state parks as Redwood National and State Parks, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and part of an International Biosphere Reserve.
Did you know? Philanthropist James Irvine negotiated to buy the canyon for the park, but he and the owner both died in the 1940s before a deal was reached.
12 Santa Elena Canyon
United States29.165° N 103.612° W
Image by Goodfreephotos_com from Pixabay From the downstream mouth, a short trail of about 1.6 miles round trip crosses Terlingua Creek and climbs paved steps to a viewpoint before descending to the water's edge, continuing into the canyon until the walls close in on the river. River trips through the canyon usually start upstream at Lajitas, meandering through open desert and riparian woodland before entering the canyon proper. The wider country around is the Chihuahuan Desert, and the river corridor forms a thin band of green across it.
Did you know? The Rock Slide formed when part of the canyon wall collapsed, filling the river with boulders the size of houses; today it is rated a Class IV rapid.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful canyons and gorges in the United States?
- On our list, Grand Canyon ranks first, followed by Horseshoe Bend and Waimea Canyon State Park.
- How deep is the Grand Canyon?
- The Grand Canyon is about a mile deep on average and reaches roughly 1,800 metres at its deepest point. The rocks at the bottom of the inner gorge are close to two billion years old.
- What makes Antelope Canyon glow?
- Antelope Canyon is a slot canyon carved by flash floods through Navajo Sandstone. Sunlight entering through the narrow opening above is reflected from wall to wall, lighting the curved red sandstone in shades of orange and purple and sometimes falling to the floor in single beams.
- Why is the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone yellow?
- Its colours come from hydrothermal alteration: hot water and steam changed the volcanic rhyolite, and iron compounds in the rock oxidised into yellows, oranges and reds. The Yellowstone River drops into it over the Lower Falls.
- How many canyons and gorges are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 12 canyons and gorges.