Dead Horse Point State Park

This canyon country has been home and travelway to Native peoples for thousands of years, among them the Ancestral Puebloan and Fremont peoples, and the Ute, Paiute, and Navajo, or Diné, who hold deep and continuing ties to the region. Their presence long predates the ranchers whose story gave the point its name.

By the late 1800s, cowboys ran mustangs across these mesas, and Dead Horse Point's narrow neck, only about thirty yards wide, made a perfect natural corral where wild horses could be gathered and the best ones chosen. The tragic legend of horses left behind to die of thirst on the point, in view of the river they could not reach, is the story most often told to explain the name, and it lingers over the place still.

The view from Dead Horse Point is really a lesson in geology written across two thousand feet of cliff. The Colorado River and its tributaries have carved down through layer after layer of sandstone, shale, and limestone, each laid down in an ancient sea, tidal flat, or desert over hundreds of millions of years, and each a different color and hardness.

The great gooseneck bend below is an entrenched meander, a curve the river cut when the land lay low and flat, then carried downward when the whole Colorado Plateau was lifted high and the river sliced deep to keep its winding course. Far below, near the river, you can sometimes spot the bright blue-green ponds of a potash mining operation, a startling splash of color in the red-rock world.

Beyond the main overlook at the point, a network of trails follows the rim of the mesa on both sides, linking a series of viewpoints that each frame the canyons a little differently. The paths are mostly gentle, crossing open slickrock and sparse pinyon-juniper woodland, and they let visitors trade the parking-lot crowds for solitude within a short walk.

The park is also popular with mountain bikers, who ride the Intrepid Trail system across the mesa top with the canyon always nearby. However you explore, the constant is the drop-off, that sudden, dizzying edge where the flat mesa gives way to the immense void of the canyon below.

The mesa top is high desert, dotted with pinyon pine and juniper and home to mule deer, jackrabbits, kit foxes, and lizards, while golden eagles and ravens ride the winds along the rim. Dead Horse Point is a certified International Dark Sky Park, and its remote perch far from city lights makes for extraordinary stargazing, the Milky Way pouring across the canyon country at night.

Spring and fall are the finest seasons, mild and clear, ideal for hiking the rim and lingering for sunset. Summer is hot and bright, with afternoon monsoon storms rolling across the plateau. Winter brings cold, quiet days and the occasional dusting of snow, which frosts the red rock and makes the great view feel even more otherworldly.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.