Canyonlands National Park

Canyonlands National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Canyonlands is the larger, emptier neighbour of Arches, outside Moab in south-eastern Utah, and the first thing to know is that the Green and Colorado rivers cut it into districts that do not connect by road. Island in the Sky, a mesa forty minutes from Moab, is the one most people see, by a paved scenic drive with overlooks, and it is what the van tours from Moab visit, usually with Dead Horse Point State Park on the same road and sometimes with Arches in one full day. The Needles, an hour and a half south of Moab by way of the Newspaper Rock petroglyphs, is the hikers' district, where the guided day hikes and the three-day camping trips go. The Maze, west of the rivers, is among the remotest places in the lower forty-eight states and needs a high-clearance 4WD, self-sufficiency and several days.

Moab's outfitters sell the rest: half- and full-day 4×4 tours down the Shafer switchbacks onto the White Rim or out to the overlooks of the river canyons, scenic flights from Canyonlands airfield that are the only way to grasp the whole, calm-water jet-boat and canoe trips on the Colorado and the Green, and the rafting expeditions of two to five days through the rapids of Cataract Canyon below the confluence. The entrance fee is per vehicle for seven days, and unlike Arches there is no timed entry. Permits, booked online and in high demand, are required for all overnight trips and for day use of the White Rim road, Elephant Hill and the other 4WD routes.

Visiting Canyonlands National Park: what you will see

The park was established in 1964, largely through the persistence of Bates Wilson, then superintendent of Arches, and the support of the Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, who had seen the country from the air, and it covers 1,366 square kilometres of the Colorado Plateau around the confluence of the Green and the Colorado, which have cut through a thousand metres of sandstone to make what the writer Edward Abbey called the most weird, wonderful, magical place on earth. Island in the Sky is a mesa at 1,800 metres joined to the mainland by a neck forty feet wide, from whose edge, at Grand View Point, the land falls in two steps: 360 metres to a broad bench of white sandstone, the White Rim, around which a hundred-mile jeep and mountain-bike track runs, and then another 300 into the inner gorges of the rivers. Mesa Arch, on the mesa's eastern lip, frames the La Sal mountains and glows orange underneath at sunrise, with a crowd of photographers to prove it;

Green River Overlook, Upheaval Dome, a crater two miles across that is probably a meteorite impact, and the Shafer trail's switchbacks are the other stops. In the Needles, spires of Cedar Mesa sandstone banded in red and white stand in ranks above grassy parks, reached on trails to Chesler Park, the Joint trail's crack and Druid Arch. Horseshoe Canyon, a detached unit to the west, holds the Great Gallery, a panel of life-sized, ghostly, armless figures painted two to four thousand years ago, the finest Barrier Canyon rock art known, at the end of a seven-mile round-trip hike. Ancestral Puebloan granaries, the inscriptions of cowboys, and the tracks of the uranium prospectors of the 1950s, who built most of the park's roads, are the human traces. Desert bighorn sheep, coyotes, ravens and the living crust of the soil, which a footprint destroys for decades, are the desert's inhabitants.

Canyonlands National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open around the clock all year, with the visitor centres from about 8 or 9 am to 4 or 5 pm and reduced in winter. April, May, September and October are the season, with warm days and cool nights; from June to August the temperature passes 38 degrees, the trails are for dawn only, and late-summer thunderstorms bring flash floods to the canyons and washes;

winter is cold and clear, with light snow on the red rock, icy patches on the roads and nobody about. The park is a certified dark-sky park, and a moonless night here is worth staying for. Carry a gallon of water a person a day; there is none at Island in the Sky. Allow a day for Island in the Sky and Dead Horse Point, another for the Needles. Arches is half an hour from Moab, Monument Valley two and a half hours south.