The memories of my recent road trip have a faintly hallucinatory quality. I know everything I saw was real yet parts of it still feel improbable. Utah operates at a scale and in colours that seem borrowed from another planet, and returning to ordinary life afterwards requires a small but noticeable recalibration. I try describing it to people who haven’t been, but the words feel inadequate even as I form them.
Over 11 days of driving a 1,200-mile loop around the southern part of Utah—through canyon country, past ancient rock formations and prehistoric petroglyphs, along dirt roads that vanish into a silence so complete it feels curated—five experiences lodged themselves in my mind.
Sleeping under the Milky Way
Utah’s dark sky reserves are legendary—vast tracts where the night looks as it did before industry and electricity. I had timed the trip around the new moon to car camp in the Valley of the Gods. What I hadn’t accounted for was Utah Highway 95.
This road sandwiched between Canyonlands and Capitol Reef National Parks defeated all scheduling. Every few miles, the landscape did something so improbable we simply had to stop and take photos. As a result, the Valley of the Gods slipped beyond daylight hours. With fading light, we turned into a small canyon, cut the engine, rolled out sleeping bags, and slept in the car. No booking, no fuss, no fee. Not a single vehicle passed us and we had a private piece of earth and sky. And the sky was about to make its case.
At 2am I stepped outside into a sky studded with stars. The Milky Way had risen in the southeast—not a faint smear but a luminous architecture, bands of cosmic dust slicing through dense rivers of stars untouched by earthly light. We made hot chocolate on the portable stove, sat on a rock, and watched shooting stars track across the spectacle.
At dawn we brewed coffee on the tailgate in complete silence as the desert assembled itself in the early light. The canyon, the coffee and the calm. At that hour, with the desert coming awake around us, they felt like more than enough. Utah teaches you this: you don’t need the perfect spot. You just need the right night, and the willingness to pull over.
Skydiving Over Moab
Skydiving over Moab is a peculiar combination of momentary dread and long-lasting delight. You sign a few forms, nod gravely at a waiver that essentially says: we are all mad here and so are you—and then find yourself in a small aircraft climbing over a landscape that looks increasingly like a topographical model someone forgot to scale down.
My tandem jumpmaster behaved like a man who had misplaced all sense of danger years ago. He tightened the harness, gave me a reassuring pat that reassured nothing, and slid the aircraft’s door open at 15,000ft with the casualness of someone airing out a room. Then he hurled himself and me out of the door.
The first few seconds were the usual chaos: wind, noise, and the sensation that my face was being rearranged into a new and less flattering configuration. But once our freefall settled into its rhythm, the world below snapped into astonishing clarity.
Moab from the sky is not scenery; it’s theatre. The canyons open like pages, the mesas rise like stage sets, the desert stretches out in colours that seem to have been mixed fresh for the occasion. When the chute opened, everything slowed. The roar dissolved, the air softened, and we drifted in wide, unhurried circles. For a moment I felt suspended not just in air but in time.
Dune Bashing & sandboarding
The dunes at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park don’t merely look coral; they appear to glow. In the hour before sunset, the sand turns a deep, saturated orange that feels almost theatrical against the backdrop of ponderosa pines and red rock mesas. We booked a UTV tour with ROAM Adventures, and within minutes it became clear why a guide is essential. From a distance, a dune field looks like a dune field. From the inside, it becomes a shifting maze of drop-offs, ridgelines, and slopes that appear to obey their own private physics. The rules were simple: trust her lines, keep the throttle open, and don’t hesitate at the crest. There is a particular kind of commitment required when your guide vanishes over what looks like the edge of the world and your own bonnet is pointed at the sky. I followed, the sand swallowed the nose of the buggy, and suddenly I was zipping down a near-vertical face of sand.
The true value of a guide revealed itself at sandboarding: instead of trudging back up after each run, she ferried us to the top in the UTV. Pure, uncomplicated joy— sliding down a glowing dune, climbing back up without effort, and repeating until dignity began to feel optional.
Getting lost among the hoodoos
There are places in Utah that announce themselves with grandeur—vast canyon walls, impossible spires, skies that perform. Goblin Valley State Park announces itself with something quieter and more unsettling: a valley floor covered in thousands of squat, bulbous sandstone formations that look more like an audience that stopped moving just before you arrived.
We stopped here on the drive from Moab towards Hanksville and walked down into the valley with no particular plan. That turned out to be the right approach. There are no marked trails, no prescribed routes, no trees to interrupt the sightlines—you simply wander in among the hoodoos and find your own way. The formations invite interpretation: a crouching figure here, a melting face there, something that might be a toad or a bishop depending on the light and your mood. Walk ten minutes in any direction and you find your own private corner of the valley, with nothing but red rock, silence, and several thousand years of erosion for company.
Hiking to Fisher Towers at sunset
We found the Fisher Towers almost by accident. We’d rolled into Moab intending to visit Arches National Park, only to be greeted by a queue so long it looked as though the park was hosting a clearance sale. With daylight fading, we drove 24 miles northeast along the Colorado River to see what the Fisher Towers were about. It turned out to be the best decision of the day.
The sandstone spires rise 900ft straight out of the desert floor—three ancient monoliths eroded into shapes that resemble the architectural ambitions of a civilisation that never quite made it into the history books. The trail around their base is a 4.4-mile return walk, mostly straightforward, but in the right light it becomes something close to cinematic.
We arrived just in time for the full sweep of golden hour. As the sun dropped, the rock shifted through its entire wardrobe—from warm ochre to deep burgundy, before settling briefly into a purple so improbable it felt like a special effect. Near the turnaround point, the Colorado River valley opened below us, framed by the towers on three sides. The scale was so immense that my eyes had to move across it slowly, the way one reads an important document. There were no crowds, no noise, no infrastructure beyond a solitary trailhead facility in the parking lot. Just a thin trail, three improbable towers, and a sky performing colours for which language feels inadequate.
Walking back in the fading light, neither of us said much. Some places make conversation feel unnecessary.