The Most Spectacular Viewpoints in the United States
8 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most spectacular viewpoints in the United States are Space Needle, Zabriskie Point and Tunnel View, Yosemite. The list covers 8 viewpoints. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The western United States has some of the most legible landscapes on earth. Rivers such as the Colorado cut deep into uplifted plateaus, glaciers carved Yosemite's granite into a valley of sheer walls and domes, and dry desert air lets the eye travel tens of miles. The national parks built roads and overlooks precisely where these forms could be read at once, so a single point can show millions of years of geology.
Yosemite has two classics. Tunnel View, at the mouth of the Wawona Tunnel, frames El Capitan, Bridalveil Fall and Half Dome in one picture, while Glacier Point looks straight across at the face of Half Dome from high above the valley floor. Death Valley offers two moods: at Zabriskie Point the eroded badlands of an ancient lake bed fold into gold and brown ridges, and Dante's View looks down more than a mile onto the salt flats of Badwater Basin.
Canyons dominate the rest. Artist Point in Yellowstone faces the Lower Falls framed by the yellow and pink walls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. At Dead Horse Point in Utah the Colorado River makes a tight gooseneck far below the mesa, and Toroweap Overlook on the remote North Rim of the Grand Canyon stands at the edge of a sheer drop of about 3,000 feet to the river. The city has its place too: the Space Needle, built for the 1962 World's Fair, looks over Seattle, Puget Sound and, on clear days, Mount Rainier.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Space Needle | Observation tower | |
| 2 | Zabriskie Point | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 3 | Tunnel View, Yosemite | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 4 | Glacier Point | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 5 | Dante's View | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 6 | Artist Point, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 7 | Dead Horse Point State Park | Scenic viewpoint | |
| 8 | Toroweap Overlook | Scenic viewpoint |
01 Space Needle
United States · 3.4 km from Seattle47.620° N 122.349° W
Image by Sebastian_127 from Pixabay Elevators rise to the observation level at 520 feet (158 m) in about 41 seconds. From there the view takes in downtown Seattle, Elliott Bay and the islands of Puget Sound, the Olympic and Cascade ranges, and on clear days Mount Rainier and Mount Baker. Since 1999 a beam of light can be projected skyward from the top on special occasions, and the city's New Year fireworks are launched from the tower. It was designated an official Seattle landmark in 1999.
Did you know? The foundation is 30 feet deep and 120 feet across, and pouring it took 467 concrete trucks working through a single full day.
02 Zabriskie Point
United States36.420° N 116.811° W
Image by Abhardphoto from Pixabay The viewpoint takes its name from Christian Brevoort Zabriskie, a vice-president and general manager of the Pacific Coast Borax Company in the early twentieth century, the firm famous for hauling borax out of the valley with twenty-mule teams. The landscape has long attracted filmmakers: Michelangelo Antonioni named his 1970 film after it, and the point appears in photographs for U2's album The Joshua Tree. Sunrise is the classic hour, when low light rakes across the ridges and the colours shift minute by minute.
Did you know? Many of the badlands' colours come from weathering and from hot mineral waters that chemically altered the sediments.
03 Tunnel View, Yosemite
Tunnel View
United States37.716° N 119.677° W
Image by Walkerssk from Pixabay What makes the view endlessly worth returning to is how much it changes. In spring and early summer, when the snowmelt is at its height, Bridalveil Fall throws spray far out from the cliff; by late summer it can shrink to a thread. Early mornings often bring mist lying in the valley floor below the walls, and in the evening the low sun turns El Capitan gold while the rest of the valley falls into shadow. For a higher angle on the same scene, a trail climbs from the overlook towards Inspiration Point.
Did you know? The overlook stands at about 4,400 feet, roughly 1,340 metres above sea level, around a thousand feet below Inspiration Point.
04 Glacier Point
United States37.731° N 119.573° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay Glacier Point is also a trailhead for some of the finest walking in the park. The Four Mile Trail (in fact about 4.6 miles) drops the full 3,200 feet to the valley floor in tight switchbacks, and the Panorama Trail runs about 8.2 miles along the rim and down past Illilouette Fall to Nevada Fall and the Mist Trail — a descent that keeps Half Dome in view almost the whole way. The Pohono Trail heads west along the rim toward other viewpoints above El Capitan and Bridalveil Fall.
Did you know? By around 1920 the crews had settled on red fir bark as the best fuel, because it burned down to an even bed of glowing coals.
05 Dante's View
United States36.221° N 116.726° W
Image by TuendeBede from Pixabay The name dates from April 1926, when executives of the Pacific Coast Borax Company, scouting the valley for its tourist potential with a local deputy sheriff, picked this spot and called it after Dante Alighieri, the poet of the Inferno. Half a century later the view reached a far larger audience: George Lucas filmed here for the 1977 Star Wars, with the spaceport of Mos Eisley painted into the basin below.
Did you know? The glittering white field to the west-northwest is the Devil's Golf Course, a crust of solid halite one to two metres thick that dissolves and recrystallises after winter rains.
06 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 name is a small historical accident. In 1883 the photographer Frank Jay Haynes christened the point in the belief that the painter Thomas Moran had sketched the falls from here for his 1872 depictions of the canyon, which include his celebrated canvas The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Later research showed that Moran had worked from the north rim, but the name stayed — and the view it offers remains the one that fixed the canyon's image in the public imagination.
Did you know? The falls pour over the Canyon Rhyolite, a lava flow roughly 590,000 years old left by the Yellowstone volcano.
07 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 park opened to the public in 1959 and covers about 5,362 acres at an elevation of around 5,900 feet. Miles of trails run through the high desert woodland on top of the mesa, giving different angles on the canyons, and the park is designated an International Dark Sky Park, so the view continues after dark under a very clear desert sky. The overlook is familiar even to people who have never been to Utah: it has appeared in a string of films, among them Thelma & Louise (1991) and Mission: Impossible 2 (2000).
Did you know? The startling turquoise pools visible from the rim are potash evaporation ponds, dyed blue to absorb more sunlight and speed evaporation.
08 Toroweap Overlook
United States36.214° N 113.057° W
John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA · CC BY 2.0 The valley follows the Toroweap Fault, along which volcanic activity built the Uinkaret volcanic field. Lava once poured into the canyon here, and the black cinder cone of Vulcan's Throne stands just west of the overlook. Below it the river crashes through Lava Falls, one of the best-known rapids of the Colorado, and old lava cascades still cling to the canyon wall. The combination of red sandstone, dark basalt and the sheer drop to the water makes Toroweap a landscape quite unlike the more visited South Rim.
Did you know? Lava flows from these eruptions travelled about 76 miles down the canyon, and they have been used to date how fast the Grand Canyon was carved.
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 the United States?
- On our list, Space Needle ranks first, followed by Zabriskie Point and Tunnel View, Yosemite.
- What can you see from Tunnel View in Yosemite?
- Tunnel View shows the length of Yosemite Valley with El Capitan on the left, Bridalveil Fall on the right and Half Dome in the distance. It sits at the eastern end of the Wawona Tunnel on the road into the valley.
- Why is the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone yellow?
- Its walls are made of rhyolite that hot water and steam have altered over a long time, leaving iron compounds that give yellow, orange and pink colours. The canyon was cut by the Yellowstone River through this weakened rock.
- What is the lowest point visible from Dante's View?
- Dante's View looks down on Badwater Basin in Death Valley, which lies about 282 feet below sea level and is the lowest point in North America.
- How many viewpoints are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 8 viewpoints.