Newspaper Rock State Historical Monument
Hundreds of deeply pecked figures overlap on a dark desert-varnish panel made by multiple Indigenous cultures across many generations.
United States: places and wildlife — page 33
Browse the published Explore collection for United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
Parowan Gap Petroglyphs
A narrow wind gap holds layered petroglyphs and historic inscriptions where travel routes cross between the Parowan Valley and western desert.
Danger Cave State Monument
Exceptionally dry deposits near the Bonneville shoreline preserve evidence of repeated human use reaching back roughly thirteen thousand years.
Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum
A research museum, visible collections, and a partially reconstructed village place Four Corners archaeology beside the communities and landscapes that produced it.
Fremont Indian State Park and Museum
Construction of Interstate 70 exposed one of Utah’s largest Fremont villages; a museum and canyon trails now connect recovered objects with rock imagery and place.
Hovenweep National Monument
Six ancestral Pueblo communities preserve towers, room blocks, and careful masonry across the Utah–Colorado border.
Golden Spike National Historical Park
Replica locomotives, original grades, and Promontory Summit frame the 1869 ceremonial completion of the first transcontinental railroad.
Topaz Museum and Historic Site
A Delta museum and the remote camp landscape preserve art, documents, barracks evidence, and testimony from people imprisoned at Topaz during World War II.
Temple Square
Sacred buildings, gardens, music, visitor spaces, and extensive construction occupy the symbolic center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Camp Floyd State Park Museum
A surviving inn, commissary, cemetery, and museum interpret the enormous 1858–61 military camp established during the Utah War.
Territorial Statehouse State Park Museum
One completed sandstone wing preserves the brief period when Fillmore served as territorial capital and reveals the politics behind a building never finished.
Red Butte Garden
Formal gardens, water-wise planting, natural-area trails, and a concert amphitheater climb the foothills above the University of Utah.
Ashton Gardens
Waterfalls, lawns, themed plantings, sculpture, and the Light of the World Garden unfold along a large walkable landscape at Thanksgiving Point.
Utah’s Hogle Zoo
Asian Highlands, African Savanna, Great Ape Building, and Utah-focused conservation programs occupy a compact hillside at Emigration Canyon’s mouth.
Tracy Aviary
One of the nation’s oldest public aviaries combines intimate habitats, free-flight programs, and conservation work in a walkable garden setting.
Loveland Living Planet Aquarium
Large aquatic habitats connect global ecosystems with Utah’s rivers and lakes inside a distinctive campus anchored by the recycled EECO structure.
June Sucker
This long-lived Utah Lake endemic survives through coordinated habitat restoration, captive propagation, flow management, and reconnection to tributaries.
Virgin River Chub
A native chub built for the Virgin River’s warm floods survives in a system transformed by water diversion, invasive fish, and development.
Coral Pink Sand Dunes Tiger Beetle
A pale, fast-running predator survives nowhere beyond a small portion of Coral Pink Sand Dunes, where its color nearly erases it against the sand.
Shivwits Milkvetch
This rare milkvetch occupies scattered patches of unusual clay soil in southwestern Utah, where development and invasive plants compress an already tiny range.
Kodachrome Bladderpod
A silver-leaved mustard with bright yellow flowers survives on a tiny set of gypsum-derived soils near Utah’s Kodachrome country.
Uinta Basin Hookless Cactus
A small cactus nearly disappears into Uinta Basin gravel until a ring of vivid spring flowers briefly reveals it.
Utah Juniper
This slow-growing native forms much of Utah’s pinyon-juniper woodland, surviving heat, cold, and lean soils through scale leaves and extensive roots.
California Gull
Utah’s state bird is an inland gull whose vast Great Salt Lake gatherings connect nesting islands, farm fields, wetlands, and migration routes.
American White Pelican
One of North America’s largest birds nests on remote Great Salt Lake islands and travels astonishing distances to feed in freshwater wetlands.
Golden Eagle
Utah’s state bird of prey is a powerful open-country eagle most often discovered as a dark, steady shape circling over cliffs and basins.
Bonneville Cutthroat Trout
Utah’s state fish survives as a native cutthroat lineage in restored streams and lakes of the ancient Lake Bonneville basin.
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Nine intimate galleries trace how Georgia O’Keeffe moved from radical charcoal abstractions to New York architecture, flowers, bones, and the northern New Mexico landscapes she made unmistakably her own.
Chaco Culture National Historical Park
Massive great houses, engineered masonry, ceremonial spaces, roads, and alignments reveal Chaco Canyon as the center of an Ancestral Puebloan world whose descendant communities remain deeply connected to it.
White Sands National Park
Wind reshapes a brilliant gypsum dunefield where dune crests migrate, plants build pedestals to survive burial, pale animals blend into white sand, and ancient footprints preserve a far older landscape.
Greater Roadrunner
New Mexico’s state bird is a large ground-dwelling cuckoo: a fast, territorial hunter that rudders with its tail, flashes white wing patches, warms dark skin in the morning sun, and sounds nothing like a cartoon beep.
Two-needle Piñon Pine
New Mexico’s state tree is a small, slow-growing pine that builds vast woodlands with juniper, feeds birds, mammals, and people with unusually large seeds, and records drought visibly in its crown.
New Mexico Museum of Art
New Mexico modernism, photography, historic painting, and contemporary work unfold inside the 1917 building that helped define Santa Fe’s Pueblo Revival civic style.
Museum of Indian Arts & Culture
Ancestral objects, contemporary art, community voices, and the Laboratory of Anthropology place the Southwest’s Indigenous histories in conversation with living Native nations.
Museum of International Folk Art
Textiles, toys, masks, devotional objects, costumes, and domestic arts become a global study of making, exchange, celebration, and the risks of displaying cultures as spectacle.
New Mexico History Museum and Palace of the Governors
The Palace of the Governors and adjoining museum connect Pueblo homelands, Spanish colonization, Mexican rule, U.S. expansion, statehood, migration, and modern New Mexico.
Indian Pueblo Cultural Center
New Mexico’s nineteen Pueblos present their own histories, art, foodways, language, dance, and contemporary life in a cultural center owned collectively by the Pueblo communities.
National Museum of Nuclear Science & History
Reactors, medicine, weapons, radiation, Cold War aircraft, and personal testimony make nuclear history a study of scientific power, public policy, risk, and consequence.
New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science
A walk through New Mexico’s changing seas, dinosaurs, volcanoes, Ice Age ecosystems, and modern research connects spectacular fossils to the rocks and landscapes outside.
Anderson Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum
Historic gondolas, record flights, weather, engineering, and human ambition explain why Albuquerque became an international center of lighter-than-air aviation.
New Mexico Museum of Space History
Rockets, pressure suits, primate pioneers, tracking systems, and a hillside rocket park connect New Mexico testing grounds to the wider history of human spaceflight.
Millicent Rogers Museum
Turquoise and silverwork, pottery, textiles, devotional art, painting, and the Maria Martinez family collection reveal the depth of northern New Mexico making.
Roswell Museum
A serious art, regional-history, and rocketry collection remains inaccessible after a major flood; the Roswell Museum is closed for an extended recovery with no confirmed reopening date.
Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian
Focused exhibitions, contemporary jewelry, archives, and a museum history shaped by Diné medicine man Hastiin Klah make this a small institution with unusually important questions.
Bandelier National Monument
Masonry villages, cavates cut into volcanic tuff, petroglyphs, ladders, and a perennial creek reveal centuries of Pueblo life within Frijoles Canyon.
Aztec Ruins National Monument
A remarkably intact Ancestral Pueblo great house, original roof timbers, a reconstructed Great Kiva, and precise masonry reward unusually close architectural reading.
Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument
Mogollon builders fitted masonry rooms into volcanic caves above the Gila River, leaving a compact but physically demanding archaeological landscape at the end of a remote mountain road.
Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument
Abo, Quarai, and Gran Quivira preserve Pueblo towns beside seventeenth-century mission churches, making encounter, coercion, labor, drought, and endurance visible across a whole valley.