Best Desert Destinations in the Southwest

Sedona, Arizona

Red rock buttes glow crimson at sunset while New Age shops peddle vortex tours beneath Cathedral Rock. Sedona became the Southwest's spiritual-tourism capital in the 1980s, and Instagram-ready trails like Devil's Bridge now draw hikers who never even ask about the vortexes. It's

Annual Visitors: 3,000,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 97 °FScenic Wow Factor: 9.5/10Typical Entry Fee: $5

added by IJRin 2 rankings

Grand Canyon National Park

A mile deep, ten miles wide, and carved by the Colorado River over six million years, it's the single most recognizable landform in America. Teddy Roosevelt begged Congress to protect it in 1908, and nearly 5 million people a year still take his advice. Sunrise at Mather Point an

Annual Visitors: 4,700,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 84 °FScenic Wow Factor: 10/10Typical Entry Fee: $35

added by IJRin 4 rankingsGrand Canyon National Park

Zion National Park

Angels Landing's chain-assisted scramble along a 1,500-foot drop is the adrenaline benchmark of canyon country, while the Narrows lets hikers wade upstream between thousand-foot sandstone walls. Zion went from a quiet Mormon settlement's backyard to one of the most permit-restric

Annual Visitors: 4,600,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 100 °FScenic Wow Factor: 9.5/10Typical Entry Fee: $35

added by IJRin 4 rankingsZion National Park

Joshua Tree National Park

Where the Mojave and Colorado deserts collide, gnarled Joshua trees and giant granite boulders created a landscape U2 immortalized on an album cover without ever setting foot inside. Rock climbers treat it as a bouldering mecca while stargazers flock to some of the darkest skies

Annual Visitors: 3,000,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 100 °FScenic Wow Factor: 8.5/10Typical Entry Fee: $30

added by IJRin 2 rankingsJoshua Tree National Park

Antelope Canyon

Light beams slicing through the wavy sandstone slots of Upper Antelope Canyon produce one of the most photographed natural phenomena on Earth. Owned and guided entirely by the Navajo Nation, access requires a paid tour, which only heightens its exclusive, almost sacred feel. A 19

Annual Visitors: 1,000,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 100 °FScenic Wow Factor: 9.5/10Typical Entry Fee: $50

added by IJRin 2 rankingsAntelope Canyon

Monument Valley

John Ford filmed Stagecoach here in 1939 and the isolated sandstone buttes became the visual definition of the American West for generations who'd never left a theater. Straddling the Arizona-Utah line inside the Navajo Nation, the 17-mile scenic drive past the Mittens and Totem

Annual Visitors: 450,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 95 °FScenic Wow Factor: 9.5/10Typical Entry Fee: $20

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Death Valley National Park

North America's hottest, driest, lowest point recorded a scorching 134°F in 1913, a record that still stands, and thrill-seekers still show up every summer just to photograph the thermometer at Furnace Creek. Badwater Basin's salt flats sit 282 feet below sea level, while Dante's

Annual Visitors: 1,100,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 116 °FScenic Wow Factor: 9/10Typical Entry Fee: $30

added by IJRin 2 rankingsDeath Valley National Park

Arches National Park

More than 2,000 natural stone arches, including the impossibly delicate Delicate Arch featured on Utah license plates, make this the densest concentration of its kind on the planet. Timed-entry reservations became mandatory in 2022 after crowds threatened to love the fragile sand

Annual Visitors: 1,500,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 100 °FScenic Wow Factor: 9.5/10Typical Entry Fee: $30

added by IJRin 3 rankingsArches National Park

White Sands National Park

Gypsum dunes so blinding-white they look like snowdrifts stretch across 275 square miles, the largest gypsum dune field on Earth, and visitors sled down them on plastic discs sold at the gift shop. Formerly overshadowed by the adjacent missile range that occasionally closes the h

Annual Visitors: 600,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 98 °FScenic Wow Factor: 9/10Typical Entry Fee: $25

added by IJRWhite Sands National Park

Bryce Canyon National Park

Thousands of orange hoodoo spires crowd a natural amphitheater at over 8,000 feet, making Bryce cooler, quieter, and stranger-looking than almost anywhere else in canyon country. The Navajo Loop and Queen's Garden trails let hikers walk among formations with names like Thor's Ham

Annual Visitors: 2,500,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 83 °FScenic Wow Factor: 9.5/10Typical Entry Fee: $35

added by IJRin 2 rankingsBryce Canyon National Park

Moab, Utah

Base camp for both Arches and Canyonlands, this scrappy former uranium-boom town reinvented itself as the mountain biking and off-roading capital of America, home to the legendary Slickrock Trail. Every spring the Easter Jeep Safari turns Main Street into a rolling museum of absu

Annual Visitors: 3,000,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 100 °FScenic Wow Factor: 8.5/10Typical Entry Fee: $0

added by IJR

Palm Springs, California

Mid-century modern architecture, natural hot springs, and an Aerial Tramway that whisks visitors from cactus desert to snowy pine forest in under 15 minutes made this Frank Sinatra's favorite escape. The Coachella Valley's golf courses and spas built an entire industry on desert

Annual Visitors: 1,500,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 108 °FScenic Wow Factor: 7.5/10Typical Entry Fee: $0

added by IJR

Santa Fe, New Mexico

At 7,000 feet, adobe architecture and centuries-old Pueblo culture give Santa Fe a high-desert identity unlike any other city on this list, older than the United States itself. The Santa Fe Trail ended here, and Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings of the surrounding red hills turned the

Annual Visitors: 1,500,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 85 °FScenic Wow Factor: 8/10Typical Entry Fee: $0

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Saguaro National Park

Home to forests of the towering saguaro cactus, which can live 150 years and doesn't grow arms until around age 75, this park splits into two units bookending Tucson. It's the definitive Sonoran Desert postcard, the cactus every cartoon desert scene is secretly plagiarizing. Suns

Annual Visitors: 1,000,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 100 °FScenic Wow Factor: 8/10Typical Entry Fee: $25

added by IJRSaguaro National Park

Big Bend National Park

Where the Rio Grande carves through the Chisos Mountains along the Texas-Mexico border, Big Bend is remote enough to boast some of the darkest skies in the Lower 48 and only a fraction of the crowds of its Utah and Arizona cousins. Hot springs right along the river let visitors s

Annual Visitors: 500,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 95 °FScenic Wow Factor: 8.5/10Typical Entry Fee: $30

added by IJRin 3 rankingsBig Bend National Park

Valley of Fire State Park

Nevada's oldest state park earns its name from Aztec sandstone formations that blaze red-orange at sunrise and sunset, just an hour from the Las Vegas Strip. The Fire Wave formation's swirling pink-and-white bands have become one of the most geologically bizarre photo spots in th

Annual Visitors: 300,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 105 °FScenic Wow Factor: 8.5/10Typical Entry Fee: $10

added by IJRValley of Fire State Park

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

The only place in the U.S. where the columnar organ pipe cactus grows wild, this remote monument along the Mexican border stayed largely closed to the public for over a decade due to border safety concerns before reopening its backcountry in the 2010s. It's a UNESCO Biosphere Res

Annual Visitors: 100,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 105 °FScenic Wow Factor: 7.5/10Typical Entry Fee: $25

added by IJROrgan Pipe Cactus National Monument

Salton Sea

California's accidental inland sea, created by a 1905 engineering failure that flooded the Colorado Desert, once drew Sinatra-era resort crowds before pesticide runoff and a shrinking shoreline turned it into an eerie, fish-bone-littered ruin. Bombay Beach's abandoned mid-century

Annual Visitors: 150,000 visitors/yrAvg Summer High: 108 °FScenic Wow Factor: 6/10Typical Entry Fee: $0

added by IJRSalton Sea