Dead Horse Point State Park

Where it sits. Dead Horse Point is a mesa top at 1,800 m in San Juan County, Utah, connected to the main plateau by a neck of rock barely 30 m wide. Stand at the railing and the Colorado River lies 610 m directly below, wrapped into a tight gooseneck around a sandstone bench, with the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands National Park to the west and the La Sal Mountains behind you to the east. The state park covers 21 square kilometres of pinyon and juniper on the mesa surface and opened to the public in 1959. It is 50 km from Moab by road and about 10 km as the raven flies.

The name. The story attached to the point is grim and probably true in outline. In the late nineteenth century cowboys used the narrow neck as a natural corral: drive a band of wild mustangs onto the promontory, fence the 30 m gap with brush, and the horses were held with no other work required. On one occasion, according to the version the park itself tells, a band was left behind the fence and died of thirst within sight of the river 600 m below. The name stuck. What is certain is the geology beneath the anecdote - the Colorado has spent roughly 150 million years carving through the horizontal beds of White Rim Sandstone, Organ Rock Shale and Cutler red beds visible in the walls, and the pale bench directly below the overlook is the White Rim, the surface that carries the famous 160 km four-wheel-drive road of the same name.

On screen. This rim is where Thelma & Louise ends. Ridley Scott's 1991 film has the two women drive their 1966 Ford Thunderbird off what the story calls the Grand Canyon; the cliff is in fact the Colorado River rim in the Dead Horse Point and Shafer basin country near Moab, hundreds of kilometres from Arizona. The stunt was practical rather than digital: the production stripped several identical Thunderbirds to the shell to make them light enough to launch, and the flight was filmed from multiple positions along the rim. A viewpoint reachable from the Shafer and Potash roads below is now widely known as Thelma & Louise Point. The same rim serves the opening of Mission: Impossible II (2000), in which Tom Cruise free-solos a sandstone wall in the Dead Horse Point area before the film moves to Sydney.

What you actually see today. A 1.6 km paved road runs the length of the mesa to the main overlook, which has railings, a shaded shelter and a genuinely accessible viewing platform - the wheelchair access here is better than at almost any comparable viewpoint in the Colorado Plateau. From there the East and West Rim trails loop 8 km around the mesa edge past a dozen unrailed viewpoints; Basin Overlook and Rim Overlook are quieter than the main platform and look down on the same gooseneck. The visitor centre has water, a small museum and a coffee bar. Kayenta Campground has 21 sites with electric hook-ups and Wingate Campground adds 20 more, all of which book out well ahead. There is a separate network of 27 km of mountain-bike trails, the Intrepid system, graded from easy to technical.

Practical notes. This is a Utah state park, not a national park, so the federal America the Beautiful pass is not valid; there is a separate per-vehicle day-use fee. There is no fuel and no restaurant. Crucially, there is no natural water anywhere on the mesa and none along the rim trails - everything must be carried in, and the visitor centre tap is the only source. The drop from the rim is sheer and unfenced away from the main platform, and the sandstone edge is undercut in places.

Getting there and timing. From Moab, drive 15 km north on U.S. 191, turn west onto SR 313 and climb 35 km onto the mesa; the same road continues to the Island in the Sky entrance of Canyonlands, so the two pair naturally in one day. April to May and September to October are the comfortable months. Summer highs exceed 35C with no shade on the rim trails. Winter brings snow and ice to the mesa and empties the car park. Sunrise lights the far canyon wall and the gooseneck directly; sunset turns the whole basin orange and is the busier of the two. The park is a certified International Dark Sky Park, and the Milky Way over the gooseneck on a moonless night is worth the late drive back to Moab.