Canyonlands

At the rim of Island in the Sky you look down, not across, at the Colorado threading a brown line through a maze of sandstone two thousand feet below. There is no soundtrack except wind, and no park in the West that makes you feel smaller.

Canyonlands is a wilderness of canyons, buttes and spires carved by the Colorado and Green Rivers, split by their confluence into districts that no road joins; driving between them takes two to six hours around the canyons the rivers cut. Island in the Sky is the accessible one, rim viewpoints a short stroll from the road; the Needles asks for boots among its striped spires and ancient granaries; and the Maze, reached by four-wheel drive, topographic map and permit, is the district rangers describe as the remotest corner of the lower forty-eight. The White Rim Road runs a hundred permit-controlled miles along a shelf in the canyon wall, three or four days by mountain bike, and in big snow years Cataract Canyon below the confluence runs some of the hardest whitewater in the West. Services are nearly nil by design: you bring everything, and that is the point.