Cedar City, UT
On the high western edge of the Colorado Plateau at 5,623ft MSL — high enough that summer density altitudes routinely hit 9,000ft. Class D, single 8,650ft runway 2/20. Southern Utah University trains pilots here through its aviation program. The closest commercial airport to Bryce Canyon (70 miles east), Cedar Breaks National Monument (15 miles east), and the Utah Shakespeare Festival in town. Cedar City was settled in 1851 by Mormon pioneers sent specifically to mine iron deposits — the mining effort never paid off, but the town stuck. SkyWest Airlines was founded here in 1972 and still maintains its corporate offices in St. George.
A 230-square-mile slot-canyon park in southwestern Utah, named by Mormon pioneer Isaac Behunin in 1863 — Zion is Hebrew for "place of refuge." The park's defining feature is Zion Canyon, a 15-mile gorge carved by the Virgin River through 2,000 feet of Navajo Sandstone, a pale orange-and-cream stone laid down 180 million years ago in what was the largest sand dune system in geologic history. Angel's Landing is a thin ridge requiring a chained scramble; the Narrows is a hike in the river itself through canyon walls less than 30 feet apart at points. The park gets over 4 million visitors a year, second only to Grand Canyon among national parks in the Southwest. From the air the canyon appears as a sharp gash of pale stone in the surrounding pinyon-juniper plateau.
Not actually a canyon — Bryce is a series of natural amphitheaters carved into the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau in southern Utah. The amphitheaters are filled with hoodoos: thin spires of pink, orange, and white limestone created by freeze-thaw weathering of the Claron Formation, a 50-million-year-old lakebed deposit. The largest concentration of hoodoos on Earth stands here — tens of thousands of them, ranging from a few feet to 200 feet tall. Park elevation runs from 8,000 to 9,100 feet, making Bryce a summer destination when lower Utah parks are sweltering. Ebenezer Bryce, a Mormon homesteader who arrived in 1875, reportedly called the area "a hell of a place to lose a cow."
At Page, the Colorado River disappears behind a 710-foot curve of concrete: Glen Canyon Dam, the second-tallest dam in the country after Hoover, finished in 1966. Behind it the river backs up into Lake Powell, a reservoir 186 miles long with nearly 2,000 miles of shoreline, blue water wound deep into red Navajo sandstone canyons; from the air that contrast is the whole show. The steel-arch Glen Canyon Bridge spans the gorge right beside the dam. The town of Page exists only because the dam did; it started as the construction camp. Watch the waterline against the rock: two decades of drought have pulled Lake Powell far below its old high marks, and the pale bathtub ring on the canyon walls shows how far.
The Colorado River makes an almost perfect 270-degree horseshoe meander around a sandstone mesa near Page, AZ. The cliff walls drop 1,000 feet straight down to the emerald-green river. From above, the geometry is almost surreal — a perfect U-shaped canyon with a lone rock pillar in the center. Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam are just 5nm upstream. This area has some of the most dramatic geology visible from any aircraft anywhere.