Utah gets famous for its red rock and its five national parks, but the history here runs just as deep. I taught history for decades before I retired in 2018, and ever since I have been lucky enough to travel and see many of these places in person. This list is my way of sharing what I have learned along the way.
I have ranked 15 historic sites in Utah from number 15 up to my favorite at number 1. The list mixes National Park Service units with places run by the Bureau of Land Management, the State of Utah, the LDS Church, and a few nonprofits. We are More Than Just Parks, after all, so we look beyond the parks themselves.
A quick note on a few details people often get wrong. Some of these are national monuments managed by the BLM, not the National Park Service, and that distinction matters. Where the land is sacred to Native nations, I have tried to say so plainly and respectfully. Here is the list.
Historic Sites In Utah At A Glance
| Site | Designation | Managed By | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral | Historic church (1870) | Episcopal Diocese of Utah | Salt Lake City |
| Alkali Ridge | National Historic Landmark (1964) | Bureau of Land Management | Near Blanding |
| Temple Square | Historic district | LDS Church | Salt Lake City |
| This Is The Place Heritage Park | State heritage park | State of Utah / nonprofit | Salt Lake City |
| Topaz War Relocation Center | National Historic Landmark (2007) | Topaz Museum / Millard County | Near Delta |
| Rainbow Bridge National Monument | National Monument (1910) | National Park Service | Lake Powell, near Page |
| Beehive House | National Historic Landmark | LDS Church | Salt Lake City |
| Bonneville Salt Flats | Area of Critical Environmental Concern | Bureau of Land Management | Near Wendover |
| Jurassic National Monument | National Monument (2019) | Bureau of Land Management | Near Cleveland |
| Natural Bridges National Monument | National Monument (1908) | National Park Service | Near Blanding |
| Parowan Gap Petroglyphs | Rock art site | Bureau of Land Management | Near Parowan |
| Dinosaur National Monument | National Monument (1915) | National Park Service | Utah and Colorado |
| Golden Spike National Historical Park | National Historical Park (2019) | National Park Service | Promontory Summit |
| Bears Ears National Monument | National Monument (2016) | BLM and Forest Service, with tribal coalition | Southeast Utah |
| Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument | National Monument (1996) | Bureau of Land Management | South-central Utah |
15. St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral
St. Mark’s is one of the oldest non-Mormon congregations in Salt Lake City, founded in 1870 by Episcopalians who arrived as the railroad and the mining boom brought new people to Utah. The current cathedral building dates to 1871, designed in the Gothic Revival style, and it remains a reminder that Utah’s story has always included more than one faith.
117 public lands destinations are under threat. Get the free briefing that 27,000+ people use to stay informed and take action.
The cathedral has long played a role in the city’s civic life, including ties to civil rights organizing in the 1960s. It became the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah in 1971. If you are walking downtown, it is an easy stop and the architecture alone is worth the few minutes.
14. Alkali Ridge
Alkali Ridge sits in San Juan County near Blanding, and it is one of the most important archaeological districts in the Southwest. This is an Ancestral Puebloan site, with the remains of villages, pit dwellings, and early masonry rooms that trace how these communities shifted from foraging to farming roughly between 700 and 1150 CE. Archaeologist J.O. Brew’s excavations here in the 1930s helped define the chronology that scholars still use today.
The site was named a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management. There is no developed visitor center, and the ruins are fragile and unmarked, so this one rewards respect more than casual sightseeing. If you go, leave everything exactly as you found it.
13. Temple Square
You cannot tell the story of Utah without Temple Square. This is the spiritual and administrative heart of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, laid out by Brigham Young soon after the Mormon pioneers reached the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Work on the Salt Lake Temple began in 1853 and took 40 years to finish.
Beyond the temple itself, the square holds the Tabernacle with its famous domed roof and remarkable acoustics, the Assembly Hall, and carefully kept gardens. The grounds are owned by the LDS Church and open to the public. Whatever your own beliefs, the history packed into these few blocks is worth understanding.
12. This Is The Place Heritage Park
This Is The Place Heritage Park sits at the mouth of Emigration Canyon on the east side of Salt Lake City. It marks the spot where, on July 24, 1847, Brigham Young looked out over the valley and reportedly said, “It is enough. This is the right place.” The 60-foot This Is The Place Monument, dedicated on the centennial of that arrival in 1947, anchors the park.
The park is a living-history village of relocated and reconstructed pioneer-era buildings, with costumed interpreters demonstrating blacksmithing, weaving, and other frontier skills. It is run as a state heritage park through a nonprofit foundation, and it is genuinely good for families. Plan on a couple of hours if you want to see the village properly.
11. Topaz War Relocation Center
Topaz commemorates one of the hardest chapters in American history. During World War II, the U.S. government forcibly removed more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, most of them American citizens, and confined them in ten camps. Topaz, in Millard County, held over 11,000 people behind barbed wire from 1942 to 1945. The conditions were harsh, with tar-paper barracks on the open desert and little privacy.
The camp site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2007. The place to start a visit is the Topaz Museum in the town of Delta, which preserves and interprets the history and can guide you to the site itself, about 15 miles to the northwest. Go to the museum first. The story it tells is one this country should never forget.
10. Rainbow Bridge National Monument
Rainbow Bridge is one of the largest natural bridges in the world, spanning 275 feet and rising 290 feet above the canyon floor. It is sacred to several Native nations, including the Navajo, Hopi, San Juan Southern Paiute, and Zuni peoples, who have regarded this place as deeply significant for generations. Visitors are asked to view the bridge from the designated area and not to walk under or beneath it, out of respect for those traditions.
President William Howard Taft proclaimed Rainbow Bridge a national monument in 1910, and it is managed by the National Park Service. Most people reach it by boat across Lake Powell followed by a short walk, though backcountry hiking routes from Navajo Mountain also exist with the proper tribal permits. The trip takes planning, but the bridge itself is unforgettable.
This great natural bridge, so recently “discovered” by white men, has for ages been known to the Indians.
Theodore Roosevelt, after his 1913 visit
9. Beehive House
The Beehive House, built in 1854, was the official residence of Brigham Young while he served as president of the LDS Church and the first governor of the Utah Territory. The name comes from the beehive sculpture on the roof, a longtime Mormon symbol of industry and cooperation that you will see all over the state, right down to Utah’s nickname as the Beehive State.
Young ran much of the territory’s business out of this house, and it hosted plenty of notable visitors over the years. It is a National Historic Landmark, owned by the LDS Church, and open for free guided tours that walk you through the restored rooms. It pairs naturally with a Temple Square visit since the two sit just a block apart.
8. Bonneville Salt Flats
The Bonneville Salt Flats are the dried bed of ancient Lake Bonneville, a vast expanse of hard white salt crust west of the Great Salt Lake near the Nevada line. The flats are not a historic “site” in the usual sense, but their history is real and worth knowing. Since the 1910s and especially the first Bonneville Speed Week in 1949, this has been hallowed ground for land speed racing, where dozens of world records have been set.
The flats are managed by the Bureau of Land Management and recognized as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern. The salt crust has thinned over the decades, and there are ongoing efforts to restore it. When conditions are right, the racing season runs in late summer. Check the BLM site before you go, because the surface can flood and close to vehicles.
7. Jurassic National Monument
At the heart of Jurassic National Monument is the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, which holds the densest concentration of Jurassic-age dinosaur bones ever found. More than 12,000 bones from at least 74 individual animals have come out of this ground. Curiously, most of them are predators, primarily Allosaurus, which has given scientists an unusual window into how these animals lived and grew.
The monument was designated in 2019 and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, not the National Park Service. Inside the visitor building you can see a “wall of bones” still in the rock and even touch a real fossil. It sits in a remote stretch of Emery County near Cleveland, so fuel up and check seasonal hours before you make the drive.
6. Natural Bridges National Monument
Natural Bridges holds a special place in the history of American conservation. Proclaimed in 1908, it was the first national monument in Utah and one of the earliest in the country. Its three sandstone bridges carry the Hopi names Sipapu, Kachina, and Owachomo, chosen to honor the Ancestral Puebloan people who lived and farmed in these canyons long ago.
Managed by the National Park Service, the monument has a scenic drive with overlooks, plus trails that range from short walks to a strenuous loop linking all three bridges. It was also the first International Dark Sky Park, so if you can stay after dark, the night sky here is something else. A small first-come campground sits near the visitor center.
5. Parowan Gap Petroglyphs
The Parowan Gap is a natural pass cut through the Red Hills west of Parowan, and its canyon walls hold one of the finest collections of rock art in the region. Geometric designs, snakes, lizards, mountain sheep, and human figures cover the rock, the work of Native peoples over a very long span of time. The agriculturally based Fremont culture lived in the area more than a thousand years ago, and ancestors of the Southern Paiute are believed to have added images as well.
What the petroglyphs mean is still debated by archaeologists, and Native communities continue to regard them as a living part of their heritage. The site is on BLM-managed land with a small parking area and interpretive signs, and it is easy to reach on a graded road. Look but do not touch, since oils from skin damage the rock art.
4. Dinosaur National Monument
Dinosaur National Monument straddles the Utah and Colorado border in a remote, beautiful corner of canyon country. It is best known for the Quarry Exhibit Hall, where roughly 1,500 dinosaur bones remain embedded in a tilted rock face exactly where they were found. You can see Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus among others, all from the Late Jurassic.
The monument is far more than fossils, though. Established in 1915 and managed by the National Park Service, it protects over 200,000 acres of red rock canyons, ancient petroglyphs, historic homesteads, and the Green and Yampa rivers, which offer some of the best whitewater in the West. Give yourself time to explore beyond the quarry.
3. Golden Spike National Historical Park
On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit north of the Great Salt Lake, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads met and a ceremonial golden spike was driven to complete the first transcontinental railroad. It changed the country, knitting the coasts together and reshaping the West. The famous spike was engraved with a hope that the railroad would unite the two great oceans of the world.
One detail worth getting right: this place was a National Historic Site for decades, but in March 2019 Congress redesignated it as Golden Spike National Historical Park. It is run by the National Park Service, and in summer you can watch working replicas of the original locomotives, the Jupiter and the No. 119, steam up to the meeting point. Reenactments of the spike ceremony run on a regular schedule.
2. Bears Ears National Monument
Bears Ears, named for the twin buttes that rise above southeastern Utah, protects a cultural landscape that holds the record of human life going back some 12,000 years. Cliff dwellings, petroglyphs, ancient roads, and countless archaeological sites are woven across this country, and it remains deeply sacred to the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and Zuni peoples who came together as the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition.
President Obama established the monument in 2016. It was sharply reduced under President Trump in 2017, then restored by President Biden in 2021 to about 1.36 million acres, and its status has continued to be contested politically and in court through the years since. Today it is managed jointly by the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service in collaboration with the tribal coalition, a genuinely new model for public land. If you visit, follow the “Visit With Respect” guidance, leave no trace, and never disturb a site.
1. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
My number one is Grand Staircase-Escalante. At roughly 1.87 million acres it is larger than all five of Utah’s national parks combined, a sweep of canyons, cliffs, and high desert in south-central Utah. The “staircase” in the name refers to the great geologic steps that climb from the Grand Canyon region up through five life zones, exposing more than 200 million years of Earth’s history in their layered rock.
This is also a human landscape. The Ancestral Puebloan and Fremont peoples farmed here and left rock art, dwellings, and granaries, and their descendants among the Hopi, Paiute, Zuni, Ute, and Navajo nations keep strong ties to the land today. The monument was created in 1996, cut roughly in half under President Trump, and restored by President Biden in 2021. It is managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
What makes it my favorite is how wild it still is. There are few crowds, endless slot canyons, and room to wander for days. Hiking, backpacking, canyoneering, and stargazing are all extraordinary here. Stop at a BLM visitor center for current road and water conditions before you head out, because this is remote country and self-reliance matters.
More Things To Do In Utah
If this list has you planning a trip, here are a few of our guides that pair well with these historic sites:
- The Mighty Five: Utah National Parks Guide
- Plan the drive: Best Utah National Parks Road Trips
- Canyon country: Things To Do In Canyonlands National Park
More Than Just Parks is a family operation. My sons Will and Jim have spent their adult lives exploring and filming America’s national parks and public lands destinations, working with the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior, and the U.S. Forest Service along the way. I taught history for a living, and in 2018 I joined them to help tell the stories behind these places. We hope this guide helps you see Utah a little more deeply.
