The Most Beautiful Places in Utah
16 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Utah are Bryce Canyon National Park, Delicate Arch and Zion National Park. The list covers 16 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Southern Utah lies on the Colorado Plateau, a high block of sedimentary rock where layers of sandstone, shale and limestone have been lifted, cracked and then cut by rivers and frost. Dry air keeps the rock bare, so every fin, arch and canyon wall shows its colour, from the red of Navajo and Entrada sandstone to the pastel hoodoos of the Claron Formation. In the north, the Great Salt Lake and the salt flats left by ancient Lake Bonneville offer a completely different, almost empty landscape.
Arches National Park holds the most famous natural arches anywhere. Delicate Arch stands alone on a slickrock bowl and appears on Utah's licence plates, and Landscape Arch is one of the longest natural spans in the world, a thin ribbon of stone. In Canyonlands, Mesa Arch frames the canyons below at sunrise. Rainbow Bridge, near Lake Powell, is one of the largest natural bridges known and is sacred to the Navajo.
Bryce Canyon is a series of amphitheatres filled with orange and white hoodoos, while Zion's sheer sandstone walls rise above the Virgin River. At Goosenecks State Park the San Juan River winds through deep, tight meanders, and Goblin Valley fills a basin with mushroom-shaped rocks. People left their mark too: Newspaper Rock carries centuries of petroglyphs, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty coils into the Great Salt Lake, the Bonneville Salt Flats host land speed records, and the Bingham Canyon Mine is one of the largest open-pit mines on Earth.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bryce Canyon National Park | National park | |
| 2 | Delicate Arch | Natural arch | |
| 3 | Zion National Park | National park | |
| 4 | Landscape Arch | Natural arch | |
| 5 | Bingham Canyon Mine | Mine | |
| 6 | Goosenecks State Park | Protected area | |
| 7 | Bonneville Salt Flats | Salt flat | |
| 8 | Rainbow Bridge National Monument | Natural arch | |
| 9 | Mesa Arch | Natural arch | |
| 10 | Newspaper Rock | Petroglyph | |
| 11 | Waterpocket Fold | Cliff | |
| 12 | Spiral Jetty | Sculpture | |
| 13 | Goblin Valley State Park | Protected area | |
| 14 | Buckskin Gulch | Canyon | |
| 15 | White Pocket | Rock formation | |
| 16 | Dead Horse Point State Park | Scenic viewpoint |
01 Bryce Canyon National Park
United States37.640° N 112.170° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay Bryce Canyon is not really a canyon. It is a chain of vast natural amphitheatres eaten into the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau in southern Utah, filled with thousands of hoodoos: slender spires and pinnacles of soft rock, some as tall as 60 m, coloured red, orange, pink and white.
Did you know? Ebenezer Bryce's homestead did not last: drought, overgrazing and flooding drove him to move his family to Arizona in 1880, just six years after arriving.
02 Delicate Arch
United States · 19.4 km from Moab38.744° N 109.499° W
Image by ISchneider from Pixabay Delicate Arch is a free-standing sandstone arch about 16 metres (52 feet) high, standing alone on the rim of a slickrock bowl in Arches National Park in eastern Utah.
Did you know? In September 2000 a photographer lit a fire beneath the arch that scarred the rock and was fined 10,900 dollars in restitution.
03 Zion National Park
United States37.203° N 112.988° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The cliffs that make Zion look otherworldly are, geologically speaking, fossilised weather.
Did you know? Elevations in the park range from about 3,666 feet at Coalpits Wash to 8,726 feet on Horse Ranch Mountain, creating very different habitats.
04 Landscape Arch
United States · 24.6 km from Moab38.791° N 109.607° W
Thomas Wolf , www.foto-tw.de · CC BY-SA 3.0 Landscape Arch is a ribbon of sandstone so thin that it seems impossible it is still standing.
Did you know? A 2004 survey fixed the span at 290.1 feet, with an uncertainty of less than a foot either way.
05 Bingham Canyon Mine
United States · 33.7 km from Salt Lake City40.522° N 112.149° W
David Ratledge · CC BY 4.0 The Bingham Canyon Mine, known to locals as the Kennecott copper mine, is the largest human-made excavation on Earth and the deepest open-pit mine in the world. 2 km deep and about 4 km across, a vast terraced amphitheatre of stepped benches.
Did you know? In 2005 high prices made the molybdenum mined here worth more than its copper that year.
06 Goosenecks State Park
United States37.175° N 109.927° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by PapaTom64 from Pixabay At Goosenecks the San Juan River coils back on itself so tightly that it seems to be going nowhere.
Did you know? A few miles away, the Honaker Trail zigzags about 2.5 miles from the rim to the river; it was built around 1900 as a supply route for gold prospectors.
07 Bonneville Salt Flats
United States40.800° N 113.800° W
Image by wnk1029 from Pixabay West of the Great Salt Lake, where Utah meets Nevada, the desert floor turns into a sheet of white so flat that the curvature of the Earth seems visible on the horizon.
Did you know? The flats lie at an elevation of about 1,291 metres and cover roughly 40 square miles of white crust.
08 Rainbow Bridge National Monument
United States37.077° N 110.964° W
Image by ArtTower from Pixabay Rainbow Bridge, in a side canyon on the southern shore of Lake Powell in Utah, is one of the largest natural bridges in the world: a single arch of salmon-pink sandstone that spans 275 feet (84 m) and rises 290 feet (88 m) above the creek bed. At the top the rock is 42 feet thick and 33 feet wide.
Did you know? Before Lake Powell began filling in 1963, reaching the bridge took several days floating the Colorado River and a six-mile hike up the canyon.
09 Mesa Arch
United States · 34.3 km from Moab38.388° N 109.864° W
Thomas Wolf , www.foto-tw.de · CC BY-SA 3.0 Mesa Arch is small as arches go, but it stands in one of the most dramatic positions of any rock span in the American West: right on the lip of the Island in the Sky, the high mesa at the heart of Canyonlands National Park.
Did you know? It stands at about 6,100 feet (roughly 1,860 metres), right on the rim above a sheer drop of several hundred feet towards Buck Canyon.
10 Newspaper Rock
Newspaper Rock State Historic Monument
United States37.988° N 109.518° W
katsrcool · CC BY 2.0 Newspaper Rock is a single panel of sandstone, but it holds one of the densest concentrations of rock art in the American Southwest.
Did you know? The varnish forms as rainwater and bacteria act on exposed sandstone, slowly laying down a film of minerals.
11 Waterpocket Fold
United States38.022° N 111.121° W
Slick-o-bot · Public domain The Waterpocket Fold is a wrinkle in the Earth's crust nearly 160 kilometres long, running south-southeast across south-central Utah from the desert near Fruita to the Colorado River at Lake Powell.
12 Spiral Jetty
United States41.438° N 112.669° W
Sculpture: Robert Smithson 1938-1973 Image: Soren.harward at en.wikipedia · Public domain 5 metres wide. Spiral Jetty was built in April 1970 by the American artist Robert Smithson and is usually counted as his most important work and a landmark of land art, which left the gallery to make sculpture out of the earth itself.
Did you know? Builder Bob Phillips liked to say the jetty was the only thing he ever built that existed purely to be looked at, with no practical purpose.
13 Goblin Valley State Park
United States38.567° N 110.710° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Steppinstars from Pixabay A shallow valley in the Utah desert is filled with thousands of squat, rounded sandstone figures — knobby heads on narrow necks, crowded together like a frozen crowd.
Did you know? The Entrada sandstone records the edge of an ancient sea, with traces of tidal ebb and flow, channels draining back to the sea and coastal dunes.
14 Buckskin Gulch
United States37.002° N 111.866° W
Image by igormattio from Pixabay Buckskin Gulch is a slot canyon of rare length: a crack in the red rock of the Colorado Plateau that runs for more than sixteen miles before it joins the Paria River.
Did you know? Paria Canyon and its tributaries average around eight flash floods a year, and each one can reshape obstacles inside the narrows.
15 White Pocket
United States37.458° N 111.704° W
Image by igormattio from Pixabay White Pocket is a small, almost hidden patch of rock on the Paria Plateau in northern Arizona where the sandstone looks as if it had been poured, stirred and left to set.
Did you know? White patches in Navajo Sandstone are thought to mark places where deep, reducing fluids dissolved the iron coatings and bleached the rock.
16 Dead Horse Point State Park
United States · 17.7 km from Moab38.506° N 109.733° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by ducken99 from Pixabay Dead Horse Point is a narrow finger of mesa in southeastern Utah that ends in a sheer drop of about 2,000 feet (610 m) to the Colorado River.
Did you know? Those potash ponds cover roughly 400 acres of the canyon floor southwest of Moab.
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 places in Utah?
- On our list, Bryce Canyon National Park ranks first, followed by Delicate Arch and Zion National Park.
- How do natural arches form in Utah?
- Thin fins of sandstone are weathered by water, frost and wind. Weaker layers erode faster than the rock above, opening holes that gradually widen into arches.
- What are the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon?
- They are tall spires of soft, layered limestone and siltstone capped by harder rock. Repeated freezing and thawing of water in cracks breaks the rim apart into columns.
- What is the Spiral Jetty?
- It is a land artwork by Robert Smithson, built in 1970 from basalt rock and earth on the shore of the Great Salt Lake. It forms a coil about 460 metres long that is sometimes submerged by the lake.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Utah?
- In our collection, the places in Utah are most often natural arches (4), nature sanctuaries (4), rock formations (2) and national parks (2).
- How many places are on this list in Utah?
- The list covers 16 places.