Road trip through Utah and Colorado: There's never been a better time to drive the US

Moki Dugway, a road carved right out of a cliff face.Credit: iStock

"You have to see Muley Point," local Kevin Christiansen says. "Head towards Moki Dugway, it's a road carved right out of a cliff face. When the road turns to dirt, turn right and keep going to the end. You'll be on the edge of the world."

He's right too: at Muley Point the Wild West is laid out before me, like a Grand Canyon no-one knew about. Butch Cassidy hid out somewhere below, waiting for his next robbery. Yet there isn't a single sign for it, nor a tourist here. It's a half-kilometre drop to The Valley Of The Gods, where monoliths and red rock spires poke up from the desert floor. Beside it, the San Juan River flows like a coiled snake through a landscape locals call "Navajo Tapestry". And because – like every other day on this trip – there isn't a cloud in the sky and there's a view we could never, ever see at home, we sit and stare, and toast it with a beer. "The world was suddenly rich with possibility," Jack Kerouac writes in his ode to road tripping, On The Road.

Has there ever been a better time to head out on the Great American Road Trip? The perpetual motion of it seemed the antithesis of COVID lockdowns.

The view from Muley Point in Utah.Credit: iStock

I start from Salt Lake City, Utah's capital, and driving east to Denver. The journey will take me across the bottom of Utah, before traversing western Colorado's wildest landscapes. It includes some iconic US ski resorts – and some of the least-known. But this will be a journey that works just as well in summer, as winter.

Salt Lake City is the perfect starting point. Two hours' flight from LAX, it's big enough for multiple flight options from LA, but small enough for an easy reintroduction to driving on the wrong side of the road. And it has 11 ski resorts within an hour's drive. Park City is one of the closest: the largest ski resort in the US, it's barely 30 minute's drive from the airport. What I like most is it reminds me nothing of home; Park City is a silver mining town built in the 1860s. I can ski (or hike in summer) right into town. Utah-based outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid mightn't have lived here, but the Sundance Kid (actor Robert Redford) ran the best restaurant in town, and it's a short drive to ski or hike the resort he ran for 50 years. He called it Sundance. I order a cowboy drink in the same bar there that Butch Cassidy and his gang frequented 130 years ago.

But the road is calling. We're headed south, where the Rocky Mountains change to sky-scraping plateaus of sandstone red rocks. I pull into Circleville to gawk at Butch Cassidy's childhood home. An hour on, I turn off the highway to the highest town in Utah, Brian Head, and ride a chairlift to the top of a ski resort. Up here, I see all the way to Arizona and Nevada.

The Narrows in Zion National Park.Credit: iStock

Further south and magic hour (before sunset) reveals a new landscape: red rock canyons surrounded by sand: Old West country. Once home to America's most infamous bandits, it's as untouched out here as it was then – they came to hide out, I'm doing the same.

I pull into Springdale, beside Zion National Park. Away from high season (May to October) and with the pandemic still keeping international visitor numbers down, now's the time to see one of America's most iconic national parks. Eighty-five per cent of the park's visitors came from overseas before COVID struck: a fair-sized hole to fill.

I head out on one of the park's most popular hikes – The Narrows, through a river below the narrowest section of the park where sandstone walls rise 500 metres – there are no other o hikers on the trail. Two days later, a public holiday draws tourists out, so it's time to head east, where the sky looks bluer, and bigger. The rock formations are square like Lego blocks. I doubt there's a lonelier, lovelier, stretch of highway in America. A three-quarter moon is the guiding light into Bluff.

Telluride, Colorado.Credit: iStock

My fear of catching Omicron shrinks the deeper into these cracks of America I slip. Bluff's as dead-as-a-door-nail anyway next morning. The town's no more than a smattering of desert cafes and restaurants. Moab – 140 kilometres north – bustles with activity but out-of-season Bluff is almost empty, despite having some of the West's most remarkable landscapes on its doorstep. The town sits beside six national parks, connected by the Trail Of The Ancients Byway. Indigenous tribes lived here for thousands of years, leaving trails to ancient settlements nestled within river valleys.

And then the landscape changes again on the short drive to Telluride, in south-western Colorado. Huge triangular mountains appear in the gaps between mountain passes beside old log cabins buried in snow. Telluride is another late 19th-century mining town that makes this more about time-travelling than road-tripping. This one's wedged at the end of a box canyon surrounded by Colorado's tallest waterfalls and the highest concentration of 4000-metre-plus peaks in Colorado. It's a real town with real people. Most of its buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places; one of them was robbed by Butch Cassidy and his gang in 1889. It was Cassidy's first bank robbery, the one which kick-started a life of crime.

Time to head north, like Butch did. It's rumoured he buried over $80,000 north of Telluride: about $3 million today. The landscape goes decidedly lunar crossing the world's largest flat top mountain (Grand Mesa) and then ease into Powderhorn ski resort for a gander, it's a mountain biking Mecca come the summer months. "This part of Colorado is the last bastion of Colorado that's still the same as it always was," ski patroller Austin Roberts tells me. There are 300 stream-fed lakes surrounded by old-growth forest on the drive, and it's barely two hours east to the ski world's most iconic destination.

You know it's Aspen by the private jets you see by the road as you drive through its Roaring Fork Valley. But Aspen started from blue-collar beginnings. The main mountain in town (Ajax) is as full of holes as Swiss cheese, mined for its silver from 1878.

It soon became the largest silver registry in the country, attracting gun-slinging outlaws. Frontiersman Wyatt Earp took up residence in town, arresting opportunists while opening a bar for them in the main street. His partner-in-crime, Doc Holliday, lived nearby. There's plenty about the old Wild West in its streetscape today. I drive 10 minutes out of town and find the ghost town of Ashcroft, once a thriving metropolis with 20 saloons, now just a pile of rotting timber in a stunning glacial valley. Aspen's got four ski resorts on the one lift ticket, but what I like best is it's still a real town. "In Aspen you either have three homes or three jobs," town historian Tom Egan says.

Heading east, the last stop is Arapahoe Basin, a mountain resort for locals, hand-built by World War II veterans where skiers "tail-gate" in the car park with BYO beers, and where lift tickets are limited to make sure the mountain's never too crowded. Then it's back to "civilisation", at Denver's sprawling international airport. The red dust from Utah's Canyonlands makes this the dirtiest returned vehicle. There's a part of me that wants to get right back in it and head back on out: "I was surprised," Jack Kerouac writes in On The Road, "by how easy the act of leaving was. And how good it felt."

THE DETAILS

FLY

Delta flies daily to LA from Australia with easy onward connections to Salt Lake City. See delta.com

All major car rental companies operate out of Salt Lake City International Airport.

STAY

Stay in a ski-in/ ski-out apartment at Park City (liftparkcity.com); stay beside Zion National Park (cliffroselodge.com); sleep close to Bluff's surrounding national parks (desertroseinn.com); ski in-and-out at Telluride's ski village (thepeaksresort.com); stay in the heart of Aspen in the refurbished Limelight Hotel (limelighthotels.com/aspen); and stay close to Arapahoe Basin in Silverthorne (thepadlife.com/silverthorne).

MORE

traveller.com.au/usa

visitutah.com

coloradoski.com

Craig Tansley travelled courtesy of Utah Office Of Tourism and Colorado Ski Country.