Goblin Valley

The valley floor is a playground from another planet — thousands of mushroom-shaped hoodoos, some squat and bulbous, others tapering to impossible points, standing in clusters across rust-coloured sand like a crowd frozen mid-conversation. The light shifts and the shapes shift with it. At dawn they cast long shadows. At noon they glow copper. At night the Milky Way arcs overhead with nothing to compete against for a hundred miles.

Goblin Valley State Park in Utah's San Rafael Swell sits between Capitol Reef and Canyonlands, surrounded by high desert with the nearest settlement — Green River — 48 miles north. Unlike most protected geological sites in the American West, Goblin Valley allows visitors to walk freely among the formations. There are no marked trails across the valley floor, no ropes, no restricted zones. The hoodoos, carved from Entrada sandstone by 170 million years of erosion, range from knee-height to several storeys tall. The Henry Mountain Bison Herd — one of the last free-ranging publicly owned herds in North America — grazes the plateau above and is occasionally visible from the approach road. The landscape's resemblance to Mars has made it a filming location for science fiction productions and a testing ground for planetary exploration equipment.