Great Western Road Trip: The Roads of Utah and Nevada

As we drive further west, we often have the choice to take the direct 4-lane freeway routes or the scenic routes. Our road trip is based on scenic viewing and flexibility, so we take the scenic routes. These are road notes for Utah and Nevada, specifically their southern portions.

You first enter Utah from 89-North near Page and Lake Powell. This little stretch of road offers immediate and scenic views of the lake, which is a very solid blue against the red rocky surroundings. It is very beautiful and there are lots of boats and swimmers in the water.

The first part of Route 89 takes you around the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and National Recreation Area. At the Visitor Center just across the state line, there is a very nice dinosaur fossil display and painting with the prehistoric life from the area. There are also a couple of ranger/paleontologists who are very knowledgeable and eager to explain any details you're interested in about dinosaurs, etc. I'd recommend a short stop, especially if you have children who are interested in dinosaurs.

The Grand Staircase-Escalante area will be to your north for about an hour of the next stretch of the road. It has very nice mountains and mesas near to the road and you occasionally drive right through the middle of a few of them. It also has a bit more vegetation than the area of Arizona that Route 89 came through, though it is still fairly sparse and of the semi-arid desert variety.

Overall Route 89 is a very nice scenic route and it's actually been featured in National Geographic Adventurer. It has a decent bit of landscape variety even in its short stretch along the southern portion of Utah. Though the vegetation nearby starts out a little sparse at first there is more and more as you head west and larger shrubs and trees start to appear as you turn north again on 89 towards Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park.

But the changes aren't just in the vegetation. As you head north on 89, the hills/mountains turn more of a pale pink/brownish-white color in contrast with the previous red hills and by the time you reach Mt. Carmel Junction, the transformation is complete. However, as you turn east and approach Bryce Canyon by highway 12, the hills return to their previous red color. Just before Bryce Canyon, you drive through Red Canyon State Park and you start to see the fabulous hoodoos that Bryce Canyon is famous for. The good thing is that there's not an entrance fee for Red Canyon because although the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon are easier to see, you have to pay to get into Bryce Canyon National Park.

Then we backtrack our route to Mount Carmel Junction where we head west on highway 9 towards and through Zion National Park. As you approach the national park, the hills start to rise up much larger into massive red and white sandstone monoliths which are covered with pine and cedar trees wherever they can find even a small space or crack to grow in. Here, like all the other national parks, you have to pay a park entrance fee. But there are amazing views and scenery with the sandstone peaks towering overhead and the forested valley below. You also get to pass through several tunnels carved through the sandstone.

As you leave Zion National Park, you continue to drive through massive hills with large mountains on every horizon and the vegetation returns to semi-arid desert with the occasional tree. You meet up with 15-south towards Las Vegas, Nevada and drive back through a corner of Arizona. The scenery really doesn't change here at all. Shortly after you drive into Nevada, you're surrounded very close with more massive stone mountains. It really makes for an incredible driving experience, zig-zagging through one huge stone mountain or hill after another.

Afterwards, the hills drop off and the vegetation in Nevada is much more desert-like with the typical cacti being the only thing that stands above the flat ground. Other than a mountain-range on the horizon, the only thing to really change the scenery is the lights of Las Vegas, which can be seen from about 15-20 miles off. Everything is really hot, dry, and bare.

As you leave Las Vegas on 95 going northwest, the ground is mainly flat with hills very far in the distance, and by flat I mean completely flat. Also, there are only two main types of vegetation, a short yellowish bush (that looks dead) and a shorter greenish bush. They're both evenly spaced apart so that everything looks really bare and the dirt in between is easy to see. The hills/mountains look more like big industrial heaps of dirt with no vegetation on them at all. It's a very barren and desolate landscape and I don't recommend driving through it for very long periods of time.

However, as you get close to the Death Valley turnoff, there is one very large sand dune on the western side that you can take a short dirt road out to. We didn't take the road, but if you're interested in massive natural heaps of sand, this is for you. We took highway 374 southwest towards Death Valley National Park. This takes you into the mountain range that has always been looming on the horizon and into the incredibly thick and dry heat of Death Valley. This is also where we entered California.