The Most Spectacular Viewpoints in North America
9 places in 2 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular viewpoints in North America are Space Needle (United States), Zabriskie Point (United States) and CN Tower (Canada). The list covers 9 viewpoints in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 8. Last updated 13 October 2026.
North America's great viewpoints come from two kinds of landscape. In the arid West, rivers and wind have cut through hundreds of millions of years of layered rock, so a single rim can reveal a canyon, a desert basin or a gooseneck bend of river far below. In the Sierra Nevada, glaciers scoured granite into domes and sheer walls that seem designed to be seen from a single spot. In the cities, towers built in the age of the World's Fair and the broadcast mast offer the same breadth of view over skylines and water.
Tunnel View in Yosemite frames El Capitan, Half Dome and Bridalveil Fall in one sweep, and Glacier Point looks across the valley at Half Dome from a ledge high above the valley floor. In Death Valley, Zabriskie Point overlooks golden badlands of old lake sediments, while Dante's View on the crest of the Black Mountains looks down on Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America. Artist Point gazes down the yellow rhyolite walls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone to its Lower Falls.
Dead Horse Point in Utah stands above a deep gooseneck of the Colorado River, and Toroweap Overlook on the Grand Canyon's North Rim drops sheer for roughly 900 metres to the river with no railing between. The city towers belong to the same tradition: the Space Needle was built for Seattle's 1962 World's Fair, and Toronto's CN Tower was for more than three decades the tallest freestanding structure in the world.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Space Needle | Observation tower | United States | |
| 2 | Zabriskie Point | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 3 | CN Tower | Observation tower | Canada | |
| 4 | Tunnel View, Yosemite | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 5 | Glacier Point | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 6 | Dante's View | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 7 | Artist Point, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 8 | Dead Horse Point State Park | Scenic viewpoint | United States | |
| 9 | Toroweap Overlook | Scenic viewpoint | United States |
01 Space Needle
United States · 3.4 km from Seattle47.620° N 122.349° W
Image by Sebastian_127 from Pixabay The tower was built to withstand winds of 200 mph and very strong earthquakes, and it rode out the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. The saucer at the top held revolving restaurants for decades. A renovation completed in 2018 replaced the observation windows with floor-to-ceiling glass, closer to the original 1962 sketches, and created the Loupe, an indoor deck with a revolving glass floor that looks straight down the structure. The original paint scheme had evocative names, Orbital Olive, Astronaut White, Re-entry Red and Galaxy Gold, and the gold roof has returned for anniversaries.
Did you know? Names floated for the structure before Space Needle won out included Star Tickler, Top Hat and Big Skookum.
02 Zabriskie Point
United States36.420° N 116.811° W
Image by Abhardphoto from Pixabay The hills are the remains of an ancient lake. Between roughly nine and five million years ago a body of water known to geologists as Furnace Creek Lake collected muds, salts, gravel washed from surrounding mountains and ash from volcanic eruptions; these layers, more than 1,500 metres thick in all, make up the Furnace Creek Formation. After the lake dried up, tectonic movement tilted the beds and rain began to carve them, a process that continues with every rare storm. Manly Beacon may owe its survival to a harder cap of volcanic rock that has protected it while the softer mudstones around it wore away.
Did you know? The Furnace Creek Formation is the main source of the borate minerals mined in Death Valley, concentrated by hot springs and altered volcanic rock.
03 CN Tower
Canada · 2.4 km from Toronto43.643° N 79.387° W
Image by jameswheeler from Pixabay Construction started on 6 February 1973. The hexagonal core was cast with a slipform that jacked itself upward as the concrete set, and by early 1974 the tower was already the tallest structure in Canada. The antenna was lifted into place in 36 pieces by a Sikorsky Skycrane helicopter nicknamed Olga, a job that took three and a half weeks instead of the six months planned for a crane; Toronto newspapers printed the flight schedule so people could watch. The tower topped out on 2 April 1975 and opened to the public on 26 June 1976.
Did you know? Early plans showed a tripod of three separate cylindrical pillars linked by bridges, a design that would have been much shorter than today's tower.
04 Tunnel View, Yosemite
Tunnel View
United States37.716° N 119.677° W
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay The composition was recognised long before there was a road here. The first picture ever made of Yosemite Valley, a sketch by Thomas Ayres in 1855, was drawn close to where the overlook stands — Artist Point, a traditional painters' vantage, lies only a few hundred metres from the tunnel mouth. But it was Ansel Adams who fixed the view in the modern imagination. His Clearing Winter Storm, made in the late 1930s from this spot, catches the valley at the moment a December snowstorm breaks up — cloud tearing away from the cliffs, fresh snow on the trees, light pouring onto Bridalveil — and it remains one of the best-known photographs of the American West.
Did you know? The Wawona Tunnel, completed in April 1933, runs for 4,233 feet through granite and is still the longest highway tunnel in California.
05 Glacier Point
United States37.731° N 119.573° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The spot was used as a lookout long before any road reached it — the Native people of the valley knew the overhanging rock at the edge, though what they called the place is no longer clear. The Four Mile Trail climbed up from the valley in 1872, a stage road for horse-drawn vehicles followed in 1882, and in the early twentieth century the route was rebuilt for automobiles. From 1872 until 1968 the point was famous for the Firefall: on summer evenings burning embers were pushed over the edge, and a glowing ribbon poured down the wall to crowds watching from the valley below.
Did you know? At 9 p.m. a caller at Camp Curry on the valley floor shouted "Let the fire fall", and the embers were pushed off the point some 3,000 feet above.
06 Dante's View
United States36.221° N 116.726° W
Image by TuendeBede from Pixabay The salt pan is the thing to watch. In flat midday light it is a blinding white sheet laced with the pale threads of dry channels; early and late in the day the ridges throw long shadows across it, and the Panamints on the far side turn copper, then violet. Sunrise is the favourite hour, when the light comes over your shoulder from the east and strikes the western range first while the basin is still in blue shade.
Did you know? The Borax company scouts of 1926 had nearly settled on Chloride Cliff in the Funeral Mountains before the Greenwater deputy sheriff, Charlie Brown, led them to this spot instead.
07 Artist Point, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
Artist Point Overlook
United States44.721° N 110.479° W
Bernard Spragg. NZ from Christchurch, New Zealand · CC0 The canyon itself stretches for about 24 miles, and in places is more than a thousand feet deep. Its colours are the product of heat and water rather than paint: the walls are rhyolite, a volcanic rock left by Yellowstone's past eruptions, which hydrothermal activity has cooked and altered. Iron compounds in the rock give the yellows and reds, and their shades depend on how much water they hold — in effect, the canyon is slowly rusting. Thermal features such as Calcite Spring still mark the canyon, and the palette shifts with the light through the day.
Did you know? At its brink the Yellowstone River narrows to only about 70 feet across before plunging into the canyon.
08 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 The name comes from a local story. Tradition holds that in the nineteenth century cowboys used the point as a natural corral, since sheer cliffs drop away around it, and that horses left there died of exposure. Whether or not every detail is true, the geography that made such a corral possible is plain to see as the road runs out toward the point.
Did you know? The canyon walls below expose six major rock formations, from Kayenta Sandstone down to the Honaker Trail Formation, spanning about 300 million years.
09 Toroweap Overlook
United States36.214° N 113.057° W
John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA · CC BY 2.0 The overlook – also called Tuweep Overlook or Toroweap Point – sits on the remote western North Rim, about 55 miles (89 km) west of the North Rim headquarters as the crow flies but far more by road. Both names come from Southern Paiute: Toroweap is usually glossed as a dry or barren valley, Tuweep as "the earth". The setting explains why a road can reach the brink at all. Here a thick band of soft Hermit Shale has worn back to form the broad Esplanade platform, and the high outer rim found farther east is missing, so the Toroweap Valley leads almost level to the edge of the inner canyon.
Did you know? Geologists still debate whether those lava dams held for up to 20,000 years, creating long lakes, or burst quickly in catastrophic floods.
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 spectacular viewpoints in North America?
- On our list, Space Needle (United States) ranks first, followed by Zabriskie Point (United States) and CN Tower (Canada).
- Which country has the most viewpoints in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (8) and Canada (1).
- Why is it called Dead Horse Point?
- According to local legend, cowboys used the narrow neck of the mesa as a natural corral for wild mustangs. Horses left behind on the point are said to have died of thirst within sight of the Colorado River far below.
- How tall is the CN Tower?
- The CN Tower in Toronto is 553.3 metres tall. Completed in 1976, it was the tallest freestanding structure in the world until it was surpassed by the Burj Khalifa in 2007.
- What is the lowest point in North America?
- Badwater Basin in Death Valley, about 86 metres below sea level. Dante's View, on the crest of the Black Mountains above it, overlooks the basin from more than 1,600 metres up.
- How many viewpoints are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 9 viewpoints in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 8.