Washington: Desert Landscapes, Water and Nature

Washington combines striking desert landscapes with trails, waterways, and distinctive nature and cultural experiences. To help plan your trip, start with a simple question: Would you most like to explore landscapes, enjoy outdoor activities, or discover natural history together? The area’s different places and offerings provide a range of options to choose from.

Desert Landscapes and Protected Nature

Snow Canyon State Park is a 7,400-acre landscape park among lava flows and towering sandstone cliffs. It lies within the 62,000-acre Red Cliffs Desert Reserve, which was established to preserve the habitat of the federally listed desert tortoise. If you’d like to combine dramatic landforms with conservation topics on an outing, you’ll find both in this area.

The Red Cliffs National Conservation Area covers 45,600 acres of varied landscapes where three physiographic regions meet: the Mojave Desert, the Colorado Plateau, and the Great Basin. These names refer to distinct landscape regions; the conservation area offers its own way to experience the region’s nature. Confluence Park is a 344-acre nature park managed by Washington County through the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve office.

Confluence Park has eleven trails for hiking, biking, and horseback riding. You can therefore plan your day around which of these activities you’d like to do. For families looking to focus on exercise and nature experiences, the choice of trail activities is a helpful guide—without implying any particular trail length or difficulty.

Water, Trails and Outdoor Activities

Quail Creek State Park attracts boaters and anglers year-round. At Gunlock Reservoir, you can go boating, fishing, swimming, and have a picnic on the beach. If you’d like to include time by the water in your trip, these different activities may help you choose where to visit. Fishing and boating are available at both places; Gunlock also lists swimming and picnicking as options.

The Pa’rus Trail follows the Virgin River and connects the Zion Canyon Visitor Center with Canyon Junction. The trail is accessible to wheelchairs, leashed pets, and bicycles. Keep these details in mind when planning your day: you can use the trail to travel between the two named points, or plan a bike ride or an outing with a leashed pet.

If you’re looking for more hiking options, consider Kolob Canyons. This northwestern part of Zion National Park offers several hiking opportunities. Alongside activities on the trails at Confluence Park, hiking in this part of the national park is another option for an outing.

Natural History and Discoveries

The Zion Nature Center has interactive exhibits, animal models, rotating activities, and crafts. For a visit with children, these offerings provide a different way to experience nature than a hike: instead of heading outdoors, the focus is on looking, participating, and creating.

At the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site, you can see real dinosaur footprints, plant impressions, and fish fossils. The museum is fully indoors and air-conditioned. It was built directly over a 200-million-year-old fossil site, where traces of dinosaurs and other animals have been preserved in hardened mud. This lets you focus your museum visit on the actual finds and the place where they were discovered.

The Zion Human History Museum also offers a distinctive viewpoint: its rear terrace has an accessible view of West Temple and the Towers of the Virgin. The museum is next to shuttle stop No. 2. While the shuttle is running, buses stop there on their way down the canyon.

To continue exploring the area, you can also learn more about the towns of St George, Hurricane, Washington, Ivins, Toquerville, La Verkin, and Virgin. Which page you explore first may depend on whether nature, water, hiking, or a museum visit matters most for your trip.

For the broader travel overview: Utah.

More destinations

More places in the same destination:

Sevier County.