The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries in the United States
12 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful nature sanctuaries in the United States are Monument Valley, Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park. The list covers 12 nature sanctuaries. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The United States set aside Yellowstone in 1872 as the world's first national park, and its protected lands still read like a textbook of geology. On the Colorado Plateau, layer upon layer of sandstone and shale was lifted slowly and then cut by rivers into canyons, arches and buttes; in California, glaciers carved the granite of the Sierra Nevada; on the plains, soft sediments erode into badlands. The dry climate of the West keeps the rock bare, so its colours and forms stay in plain view.
Monument Valley's sandstone buttes stand on Navajo Nation land on the Arizona–Utah border and became the backdrop of John Ford's westerns. Bryce Canyon is filled with orange hoodoos, Zion's Navajo sandstone walls tower over the Virgin River, and the Grand Canyon exposes rocks close to two billion years old at its bottom. Yosemite National Park has the granite faces of El Capitan and Half Dome, and Sequoia National Park protects the General Sherman Tree, the largest tree on Earth by volume.
Smaller places add their own shapes: the San Juan River's tight meanders at Goosenecks State Park, the dark, sheer walls of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, the crowd of squat hoodoos in Goblin Valley, the eroded buttes and fossil beds of the Badlands in South Dakota, and Canyon de Chelly, where Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings sit above fields that Navajo families still farm.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Monument Valley | Protected area | |
| 2 | Bryce Canyon National Park | National park | |
| 3 | Zion National Park | National park | |
| 4 | Sequoia National Park | National park | |
| 5 | Grand Canyon National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 6 | Yosemite National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 7 | Badlands National Park | National park | |
| 8 | Goosenecks State Park | Protected area | |
| 9 | Canyon de Chelly National Monument | Canyon | |
| 10 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | |
| 11 | Mesa Verde National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 12 | Goblin Valley State Park | Protected area |
01 Monument Valley
United States36.983° N 110.100° W
Image by ArtTower from Pixabay Inside the park a dirt road of about 17 miles loops among the buttes past a series of viewpoints. Other parts of the valley, such as Mystery Valley and Hunts Mesa, can be seen only with a Navajo guide.
Did you know? Sergio Leone shot part of Once Upon a Time in the West here in 1967, the first Spaghetti Western filmed outside Europe.
02 Bryce Canyon National Park
United States37.640° N 112.170° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay People have lived here for at least 10,000 years. The Paiute told that the hoodoos were the Legend People, turned to stone by the trickster Coyote for their misdeeds. The name comes from Ebenezer Bryce, a Scottish-born Mormon settler who homesteaded below the amphitheatre in 1874 and is reputed to have called it a hell of a place to lose a cow. Protected as a national monument in 1923 and a national park in 1928, Bryce is also a Dark Sky Park: its night sky is among the darkest in North America, with about 7,500 stars visible to the eye, and rangers lead stargazing programmes. The park is home to the largest protected population of the threatened Utah prairie dog.
Did you know? The hoodoos are carved from the soft Claron Formation of the Pink Cliffs, while harder rock nearby survives as solid monoliths in the White Cliffs.
03 Zion National Park
United States37.203° N 112.988° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Pexels from Pixabay Zion's darkness is as much a resource as its rock. Away from the sandstone glow of sunset, the park carries International Dark Sky Park status, meaning its night skies are protected from light pollution seriously enough to show the Milky Way clearly on a clear night — a designation that's becoming rarer nationally even as more people learn to value it, and one that rewards anyone willing to stay past the point when the tour buses leave.
Did you know? The Zion–Mount Carmel tunnel, opened in 1930, runs for about 1.1 miles through the sandstone, with windows cut into the cliff.
04 Sequoia National Park
United States36.565° N 118.773° W
Image by Kjjj3 from Pixabay The complication is what a century of fire suppression did to that arrangement. With small fires kept out of the groves for decades, fuel built up on the forest floor, and starting around 2015, wildfires burning through that accumulated fuel have reached temperatures the trees never evolved to survive — hot enough, in the worst cases, to cook the seeds inside cones that would once have opened safely. Parks staff now use prescribed, deliberately low-intensity burns to try to restore the fire regime the sequoias actually need, rather than the one climate change and a century of well-meant suppression left behind.
Did you know? The Giant Forest grove holds five of the ten largest trees on Earth by volume.
05 Grand Canyon National Park
United States36.055° N 112.122° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Filio from Pixabay Most people see the canyon from the South Rim, where the rim road and the paved Rim Trail string together viewpoints such as Mather, Hopi and Mohave Points. The South Rim also holds a remarkable group of early park architecture. Mary Colter designed Hermit's Rest and Lookout Studio (both 1914), Bright Angel Lodge (1935), whose stone fireplace repeats the canyon's rock layers in order, and the Desert View Watchtower of 1932 at the eastern end, modelled on Ancestral Puebloan towers and offering one of the few views down to the river.
Did you know? The canyon is about 446 km long, up to 29 km wide and more than 1.8 km deep.
06 Yosemite National Park
United States37.742° N 119.537° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12019 from Pixabay The Ahwahneechee lived in the valley for thousands of years before the Mariposa War brought outsiders in 1851. Only thirteen years later, in 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, placing the valley and Mariposa Grove under protection; John Muir's campaign then led to the national park in 1890. UNESCO added it to the World Heritage list in 1984.
Did you know? The 1864 Yosemite Grant was the first time the US government set land aside specifically for preservation and public use, eight years before Yellowstone.
07 Badlands National Park
United States43.750° N 102.500° W
Image by victortran0107 from Pixabay The light is the thing to wait for. At sunrise and sunset the low sun rakes across the ridges and the stripes in the rock appear almost painted; at midday the same landscape goes flat and bleached. Short trails near the eastern entrance, such as the Window Trail, lead straight in among the formations.
Did you know? In 1993 two visitors spotted a backbone by a picnic area, launching the Big Pig Dig that went on to yield thousands of fossil bones.
08 Goosenecks State Park
United States37.175° N 109.927° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by PapaTom64 from Pixabay The state park, established in 1962, covers only about ten acres at the edge of the cliff and is deliberately simple: an overlook, scattered primitive campsites and no developed trails. On the horizon Alhambra Rock, a dark volcanic intrusion, rises beyond the town of Mexican Hat, and the buttes of Monument Valley lie to the southwest. The remoteness that keeps the landscape so bare also keeps it dark, and in March 2021 the park was certified as an International Dark Sky Park.
Did you know? Canyon cutting sped up during the Ice Ages, when a wetter climate sent floods down the San Juan up to ten times larger than any recorded in human history.
09 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.
10 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.
11 Mesa Verde National Park
United States37.260° N 108.494° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- Dark Sky Place
Image by kaylee from Pixabay The outside world learned of the ruins in the 1880s. Local rancher Richard Wetherill and his companion Charlie Mason came upon Cliff Palace in December 1888, and in 1891 the young Swedish scientist Gustaf Nordenskiöld carried out the first methodical excavations, shipping many objects to Europe. Alarm at looting helped push Congress to protect the area, and the decades of stabilisation, excavation and wildfire-revealed discoveries since then have made Mesa Verde one of the best-studied ancient landscapes in North America.
Did you know? Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling in the park, contains around 150 rooms and 23 kivas.
12 Goblin Valley State Park
United States38.567° N 110.710° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Steppinstars from Pixabay The San Rafael Swell carries pictographs and petroglyphs left by Fremont, Paiute and Ute peoples, but the hidden valley itself was found by cowboys searching for cattle and, in the late 1920s, by Arthur Chaffin, operator of the Hite ferry on the Colorado, who was looking for a route between Green River and Caineville. He came back in 1949 to photograph what he called the Valley of the Mushrooms. Publicity drew visitors despite the remoteness, the state acquired the land, and Goblin Valley became a state park in 1964; it was enlarged with more than 6,000 acres of federal land in 2019. The valley's eerie forms have stood in for an alien world on film, most memorably in Galaxy Quest (1999).
Did you know? Protection of the valley was first proposed in 1954; it began as a state reserve and was formally made a state park on 24 August 1964.
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 nature sanctuaries in the United States?
- On our list, Monument Valley ranks first, followed by Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park.
- What is the difference between a national park and a national monument?
- National parks in the United States are created by an act of Congress, while national monuments can also be proclaimed by the President under the Antiquities Act of 1906. Many parks, including the Grand Canyon and Zion, began as national monuments.
- Why is Bryce Canyon not really a canyon?
- Bryce was not cut by a river. It is a series of natural amphitheaters eroded into the edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, where frost and rain have carved the soft limestone into hoodoos.
- Is Monument Valley a national park?
- No. Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park is managed by the Navajo Nation, not by the National Park Service.
- How many nature sanctuaries are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 12 nature sanctuaries.