Arches National Park preserves over 2,000 natural sandstone arches, including the world-famous Delicate Arch, in addition to a variety of unique geological resources and formations. The park is located near Moab, and is 119 square miles in size. A 40-mile round-trip paved road leads to the major sights, including Balanced Rock, Skyline Arch, Double Arch, the Windows section, Fiery Furnace, and the park's most famous geologic feature - Delicate Arch.

Bryce Canyon is a small national park in southwestern Utah. Despite its name, this is not really a canyon, but rather a spectacular series of 14 huge amphitheaters, each of which is carved at least 1,000 feet into the chromatic limestone of the Paunsaugunt Plateau. Each of the park's amphitheaters is crowded with a multitude of rock sculptures - domes, pinnacles, windows, natural bridges, arches, temples, and spires called "hoodoos." Your first view of Bryce Canyon (usually at Sunrise Point) is rather dramatic, as rows of pine trees veil the color and grandeur of the canyon until you reach the rim. Here the brilliant hues come alive - especially with the rising and setting of the sun.

In the southern part of Utah, the Colorado and Green Rivers carve the high desert (the Colorado Plateau) into a wonderful labyrinth of canyons. Over millions of years, the rivers and their small tributaries have carved the flat sandstone rock layers into many amazing forms with a wide range of colors. The vast landscape offers numerous vistas of rust-colored pinnacles, high mesas, sculpted buttes, sandstone spires and sheer crimson cliffs. The canyons divide the park into three major sections - Island In The Sky, The Needles, and The Maze.

Capitol Reef is the name of an especially rugged and spectacular part of the Waterpocket Fold near the Fremont River. The area was named for a line of white domes and cliffs of Navajo Sandstone, each of which looks somewhat like the United States Capitol building, that run from the Fremont River to Pleasant Creek on the Waterpocket Fold. The local word reef referred to any rocky barrier to travel, like a coral reef.

Chaco Canyon is hosting the densest and most exceptional concentration of pueblos in the American Southwest. The park is located in northwestern New Mexico, between Albuquerque and Farmington, in a relatively inaccessible canyon cut by the Chaco Wash. Containing the most sweeping collection of ancient ruins north of Mexico, the park preserves one of America's most fascinating cultural and historic areas. Between AD 900 and 1150, Chaco Canyon was a major center of culture for the ancient pueblo people - the Chaco sites are part of the homeland of Pueblo Indian peoples of New Mexico, the Hopi Indians of Arizona, and the Navajo Indians of the Southwest.

Death Valley is a long, low depression east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the most eastern part of California at the border to Nevada. From an elevation of about 3000 feet at the north end, the land slopes down steadily and for 70 miles the floor is below sea level, reaching a low point of -282 feet at Badwater, the lowest point in the Western hemisphere. The depth of the depression is partly responsible for the extreme high temperatures, which can exceed 130°F in summer. The National Park covers 3 million acres, making it the largest in the US outside Alaska. Nearly 550 square miles are below sea level.

There are a lot of great places to visit, some of them are shown below. If you want to explore all of them, you need to stay a couple of days, have a high-clearance car and be prepared to hike a few miles per day. The best time to visit is March and April, afterwards it will be too hot to hike some of the trails and canyons.

Perhaps no landscape on Earth is as surprising to the observer as the vast face of the Grand Canyon. It is not just a simple canyon but rather a whole maze of canyons, fissures and gorges worn into the rock with unusual buttes, mesas and rock spires standing between them. The exposed multicolored sedimentary layers take on varying hues as the angle of the sun and shadow change throughout the day. It is truly one of the great natural wonders of the world.

The Grand Staircase refers to an immense sequence of sedimentary rock layers that stretch south from Bryce Canyon National Park through Zion National Park and into the Grand Canyon. With approximately 7,600 square km it is the largest US National Monument and stretches from the towns of Big Water, Glendale and Kanab, Utah in the Southwest, to the towns of Escalante and Boulder in the Northeast. There are three main regions: the Grand Staircase, the Kaiparowits Plateau, and the Canyons of the Escalante.

Petrified Forest National Park is located in northeastern Arizona and features one of the world's largest and most colorful concentrations of petrified wood. The northern part of the park encompasses an area of multihued badlands, called the Painted Desert.

Zion National Park was Utah’s first national park and was established in 1909 as Mukuntuweap National Monument. It became Zion National Park in 1919. The name "Zion" meaning "place of refuge," was given to the canyon by Mormon pioneers. The Virgin River has gnawed through native sandstone to create the incredibly scenery found in Zion Canyon. Massive canyon walls with a height of up to 2,500 feet ascend on both sides of the river, the cliffs range in color from cream, to pink, to red.