Moab, UT
Eighteen miles northwest of Moab, on a sage plateau between Canyonlands and Arches National Parks. Single 7,099ft runway 3/21, uncontrolled, owned by Grand County. The closest civilian airport to Arches (5 miles south), Canyonlands Island in the Sky district (15 miles southwest), and Dead Horse Point State Park (10 miles south). Tex's Riverways and Redtail Aviation both run scenic flights from the field — the canyon country east of Moab from 2,000ft AGL is one of the great GA experiences in the United States. Density altitude is a factor: field elevation 4,557ft, summer DA can hit 8,500ft. The Colorado River runs along the southeast side of the field.
The densest concentration of natural stone arches in the world — over 2,000 catalogued in a 119-square-mile park north of Moab. The arches form in 280-million-year-old Entrada Sandstone laid down on an inland sea, then uplifted, then weathered along vertical fracture planes. Wind and water carve fins; fins thin into windows; windows collapse to leave arches. Delicate Arch (the one on the Utah license plate) is 65 feet tall and stands alone on a sandstone bowl with the La Sal Mountains visible 30 miles east. Landscape Arch, in the Devils Garden, is 306 feet across — the longest natural arch in the United States, so thin in the middle that the park has closed the trail underneath since a 60-foot slab fell from it in 1991.
The largest national park in Utah at 527 square miles — four districts divided by the Green and Colorado Rivers, which meet at the heart of the park in a Y-shaped confluence. Island in the Sky district sits 1,000 feet above the rivers on a mesa with the most accessible viewpoints. The Needles district has red-and-white-banded sandstone spires. The Maze district is the most remote, requiring a high-clearance 4WD truck and a multi-day expedition. The rivers themselves run another 1,000 feet below the Island mesa, in canyons over a thousand feet deep. The 1869 Powell expedition first mapped this confluence; the park was created in 1964.
Straddling the Arizona-Utah line, Monument Valley is the red-rock landscape everyone has seen even if they have never been there; the sandstone buttes that stood behind half the Westerns ever filmed. The formations rise 400 to 1,000 feet straight off the desert floor, spaced far apart, so from above they read as isolated towers throwing long shadows across the sand. The two best-known, the Mitten Buttes, look from the ground like a pair of hands; from the air you mostly see their flat tops and the gap between. It is a Navajo tribal park, not a national park, and the land is lived on and worked. There is no big airport near it, and the country around it is as empty as it looks.
Out on the high desert of the Four Corners, a single black tower rises about 1,500 feet off an otherwise flat plain; on a clear day you can pick it out from fifty miles away, standing entirely alone. Shiprock is a volcanic neck, the hardened throat of a volcano that erupted around 27 million years ago; the soft ground around it eroded away and left the plug standing. Long ridges of rock, old lava-filled cracks, radiate out from the base like spokes. The Navajo call it Tse Bit'a'i, the rock with wings, and it is sacred ground; climbing it has been forbidden for decades. From the air it reads exactly like the name suggests, a winged shape sitting by itself in the middle of nothing.