Painted Desert Inn

A traveler's stop first rose on this rim in the years before the park existed, built partly of petrified wood, and it served the trickle of tourists crossing the high desert. In the 1930s and 1940s the building was rebuilt and expanded in the graceful Pueblo Revival style seen today, work carried out in large part by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression, whose crews shaped the adobe, timbers, and stonework by hand.

For a stretch of the mid-twentieth century the inn operated as a stop along Route 66, offering meals, curios, and rest to travelers on the famous highway. When the interstate later bypassed the old road, the inn's roadside trade faded, and after years of uncertainty it was preserved and restored as a museum, now honored as a National Historic Landmark within the national park.

The inn's interior is graced by murals painted by Fred Kabotie, a celebrated Hopi artist commissioned in the 1940s to decorate its walls. His images draw on Hopi life and tradition, from ceremonial figures to scenes of the salt journey, and they give the building a depth of meaning beyond its architecture, tying it to the living culture of the region's Native peoples.

The Hopi people, whose mesas lie to the north, and the Navajo, Zuni, and other nations of the Colorado Plateau all have long and continuing ties to this desert country. The murals stand as a reminder that this land is not empty scenery but homeland, and that its stories belong to peoples who remain very much present today.

The view from the inn is the reason for its site. Below and beyond spread the badlands of the Painted Desert, low hills and mesas banded in reds, oranges, purples, and grays that shift and glow as the light changes through the day. These colors come from ancient layers of mudstone and clay, stained by iron and minerals and laid down over immense spans of time, now weathered into bare, rounded forms.

This is a landscape almost without vegetation, sculpted purely by erosion, and it changes character hour by hour. In the low light of morning and evening the bands of color deepen and the hills throw long shadows, and after a rare rain the wet clay can turn startlingly vivid. From the inn's terraces the whole shifting spectacle is laid out like a painting, which is exactly how the desert earned its name.

The inn sits high on the Colorado Plateau, so the seasons here are those of a cold desert. Spring and fall are the most pleasant times, with mild days ideal for exploring the inn and the overlooks, though spring can bring strong winds across the open country.

Summer days are hot and bright on the exposed rim, tempered somewhat by the elevation and by the dramatic monsoon thunderstorms that build over the desert in the afternoons. Winter is cold, sometimes snowy, and often windy, and a dusting of snow on the red-and-gray badlands is a rare and beautiful sight. Whatever the season, the light and the color of the Painted Desert are the enduring reward.

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