The highway cop tells me I’ve been tail-gating trucks, that’s why he’s pulled me over. I think he’s just curious. He’s standing above my brother in the passenger seat outside on the road, asking questions. “What’s the accent?” he asks. “Australian,” we tell him. “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you then?”
It feels like it. Out here on Utah’s main highway south, I’m surrounded by mountains as far as I can see. These are the Rockies – snow-capped, rising to the heavens – but as we venture south towards Nevada (Las Vegas isn’t far if you fancy a flutter), the countryside changes dramatically – snowy mountains turn to rugged red rock canyons: cowboy country. It changes so fast, I don’t even see it coming.
For anyone who figured the great American road trip was taking a Mustang along California’s Highway One, you haven’t driven a 4WD through the dead heart of Utah and Colorado. For this is Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid country – it’s the proper Wild West, as American as hot dogs… and guns.
We fly into Salt Lake City, Utah’s capital, to pick up our vehicle. At two hours flying time from LAX, it’s an easy kick-off for America’s best road trip. My brother is co-driver – we’ve been confined to Australia for two years because of Covid, America’s widest open spaces seem the right kind of place to venture back out into the world.
Our first destination is Park City, partly because I met my wife here. Only 35 minutes east of Salt Lake City, it’s home to America’s largest ski resort, and its prettiest main street. Created during the Wild West’s silver mining boom of the 1860s, that history’s all still there in its streetscape. Now there’s bars and restaurants and boutiques in those same old buildings, dwarfed by 3000-metre-high mountains. You can ski right down from its slopes just to its main street, right into the US’s only ski-in, ski-out whiskey distillery. I lived here a year – it doesn’t matter if you’re here in winter or summer, Park City is the epitome of the classic American mountain town every day of the year.
This road trip will take us through America’s most iconic mountain towns, and its loneliest desert landscapes. After three days in Park City, we take off south – it’s five hours driving time to Zion National Park. We make it there on sunset, when the canyons all round us are oozing red. There’s no clouds in this part of Utah, so dusk lasts forever, putting on a show you should bags the passenger seat for.
We’re sleeping in Springdale, five minutes from the park, staying in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over a meadow beside a river. There’s an outdoor Jacuzzi and a full moon above lights up the canyons all round us. It’s a hell of a place for a late night soak.
Next morning, we drive through the park just after dawn, when big-horned sheep and elk line the roadway. It’s just 15 minutes drive to one of Zion’s biggest draw-cards, The Narrows. We hike through a swollen river for kilometres with no-one else around, between sandstone walls that rise half-a-kilometre above. Sometimes it’s up to our waist, other times we scramble over smoothed out pebbles by the water, beneath waterfalls. Next day we take a walk along one of the world’s most famous hikes – Angel’s Landing – named because its founder declared: “Angel’s Landing is so high that only an angel could land on it.” The path steers us out along an impossibly thin mesa with a huge drop-off on both sides and just a chain to hold onto.
There’s many hikes to try, but we have to be in Denver in just over a week. We head out east, along soaring mountain passes till we reach the red dust of the desert. At nightfall, we reach the tiny desert town of Bluff, and head out for a steak under a billion stars.
Moab is only a couple of hours north – it’s one of America’s best known adventure destinations – but I prefer the isolation here. We stumble on a little known lookout, Muley Point, half an hour out of town and sit on the edge of a 300-metre-high canyon staring across The Valley Of The Gods. Monument Valley – where your favourite John Wayne western was probably filmed – is also below, further out towards the horizon.
There’s so much to see in these canyon-lands of Utah, but Colorado’s only a few hours east and we’re due in its prettiest mountain town, Telluride. Wedged at the end of a box canyon, it’s where the highest concentration of 4000-metre-plus mountains in Colorado are. Telluride is where Butch Cassidy started his life of crime, robbing a bank in its main street in 1889.
The skiing here’s as good as it gets. A gondola runs between town and the ski village, we time our run to catch the alpenglow at sunset illuminate the mountains. There’s hip open-air restaurants at the top of the mountain, serving long European-style lunches. Telluride is another mountain town where it matters little if you come in winter or summer.
The road’s calling us again – we’re off to another of Colorado’s world-famous mountain towns, Aspen, but we stop along the way for a slice of small town Colorado, far from other tourists. The road’s ours alone for the last hour into Powderhorn Ski Resort – a ski and mountain bike resort you’ve never heard of, I bet. There’s over 300 lakes on the drive in, and these mountains are part of the largest flat rock mountains on Earth, nothing like the triangular ones in Telluride.
Ranchers and hippies mix here in tiny towns like Mesa, where you won’t see another international tourist – this looks like the real Colorado. Four hours drive north-east of here is Aspen, where the world comes to be fabulous. But lost in all the celeb stories is that Aspen’s still a small Colorado mountain town at heart – Wyatt Earp used to patrol its streets, and there’s still plenty about the Wild West in its 2022 streetscape. It’s been a hippie magnet for half a century, there’s just as many of them around as Brazilian tourists in fur coats checking their reflections out in shop windows.
We grab a seat at Aspen’s best apres bars – The Little Nell’s Ajax Bar and Wine Bar – and enjoy the show: people-watching in Aspen is as bona fide an attraction as skiing or hiking its mountains.
We stay at The Limelight Hotel, which epitomises Aspen. It’s a lodge with just enough fancy trimmings in the middle of town – while it’s chic, it’s also where locals congregate to watch live music in the afternoon with views through floor-to-ceiling windows right up at the ski slopes (the ski mountain is right in the middle of town). There’s bars in town offering $5 buffalo wings and $5 beers – Aspen’s as fancy as it you want it to be.
Things are just as local at our last stop, Arapahoe Basin, an hour out of Denver. It’s been a local’s favourite since it opened in the 1940s. In the car parks next to the slopes locals party after skiing (or mountain biking in summer), with stereos blaring. Though its down-home apres bar serves the most celebrated Bloody Marys in the Rockies.
We check our 4WD in at Denver Airport. It’s covered in red dust and caked mud from the mountains – I relive each adventure along the way just by looking it over for damage. It’s like I’ve been away from home for months – and it’s not till I get to check-in that I realise I haven’t even thought about COVID once.
Take me there
Getting there
Delta flies daily to LA from Australia with onward connections to Salt Lake City. All major car rental companies operate out of Salt Lake City International Airport.
Where to stay
Stay in a ski-in/ski-out apartment at Park City (liftparkcity.com); stay beside Zion National Park (cliffroselodge.com); stay in Bluff at Desert Rose Inn (desertroseinn.com), at Telluride’s ski village, (thepeaksresort.com), in the refurbished Limelight Hotel in Aspen (limelighthotels.com/aspen); and stay close to Arapahoe Basin in Silverthorne (thepadlife.com/Silverthorne)
Explore more: visitutah.com, coloradoski.com
