United States
Red rock arches framing the desert sky in a town built for dirt and adrenaline.
Red dust coats everything — your boots, your handlebars, the rim of your beer glass at the brewpub after dark. Moab sits in a valley of red Entrada sandstone where two national parks, a state park, and the Colorado River converge, and the town exists because people want to ride, climb, paddle, and scramble through all of it.
Moab in eastern Utah serves as basecamp for Arches National Park — home to more than 2,000 documented natural stone arches, more than any other place on Earth — and Canyonlands National Park to the south. The town itself sits along the Colorado River, where commercial rafting outfitters launch daily from directly below the bridge. The Slickrock Trail, a 9.6-mile loop across bare sandstone, helped define the sport of mountain biking when riders discovered that desert-varnished rock grips tyres better than dirt. Dead Horse Point State Park, minutes from town, delivers a 2,000-foot canyon panorama in a 270-degree arc. Moab runs hot — summer temperatures push past 40°C — but spring and autumn bring ideal conditions for the trails that radiate from town in every direction.
Friends
Moab is built for groups who want to move. Mountain biking Slickrock, rafting the Colorado, scrambling through Arches — the town's infrastructure means you can push hard all day and recover over craft beer and food trucks by night.
Couple
Watching sunset through Delicate Arch, paddling the Colorado at dawn, sharing a campsite beneath red cliffs — Moab balances adrenaline and romance in a landscape that makes every photograph look retouched.
Pulled pork sandwiches from a food truck parked beneath red cliffs.
Cold craft beer after mountain biking the Slickrock Trail until your arms shake.
Breakfast burritos the size of a forearm from a dawn-opening diner.

Pedra de Lume
Cape Verde
Float in a salt lake inside an extinct volcano, crater walls rising on every side.

Vale do Paúl
Cape Verde
Sugarcane terraces spill down a volcanic crater into the greenest valley in the archipelago.

Monastery of St. Anthony
Egypt
Earth's oldest inhabited monastery, wedged into a Red Sea mountain canyon since the fourth century.

Hoang Su Phi
Vietnam
Rice terraces so vertiginous they look like topographical maps carved directly into the sky.

Lander
United States
A river vanishes underground and resurfaces a quarter-mile later in a pool of giant trout.

Craters of the Moon
United States
A lava field so alien that NASA trained Apollo astronauts on these flows for moon missions.

New Orleans
United States
Jazz spilling from doorways at 2 a.m. while beignet sugar dusts your collar.

Savannah
United States
Spanish moss dripping into squares where horse hooves echo on cobblestones after dark.