Moab, Utah

Where it sits. Moab occupies a green, irrigated trench called Spanish Valley, cut into the sandstone of south-eastern Utah about 8 km from the Colorado River and 1,220 m above sea level. The La Sal Mountains rise to more than 3,800 m immediately to the east, close enough that snow sits on them while the valley floor is at 30C. The town is small - somewhere around 5,000 permanent residents - and is squeezed along U.S. 191, with Arches National Park beginning 6 km to the north and the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands roughly 50 km to the south-west by road.

The story behind it. Mormon settlers attempted a mission here in 1855, abandoned it after conflict with the Ute, and returned to farm in the late 1870s. For seventy years Moab was a fruit-growing town of a few hundred people. Then in 1952 a Texan geologist named Charlie Steen drilled the Mi Vida claim in Lisbon Valley, 60 km to the south-east, and struck a uranium deposit that made him rich overnight and turned Moab into a boom town of prospectors, drillers and mill workers within two years. The Atomic Energy Commission's purchase guarantees ended in the 1960s, the boom collapsed, and the network of rough exploration tracks the prospectors bulldozed across the slickrock was left behind. Those tracks became the mountain-bike and four-wheel-drive routes the town now lives on.

On screen. Moab's film history is older and better organised than most visitors realise. In 1949 the rancher George White began actively recruiting Hollywood productions to the area, creating what is generally regarded as the longest-running film commission anywhere. His first major catch was John Ford, who brought Wagon Master here in 1949 and returned in 1950 for Rio Grande with John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, using Professor Valley and the ground around the Fisher Towers along the Colorado River. Since then more than a hundred features and countless commercials have shot in the area: the opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) at Double Arch in Arches National Park, the closing flight of Thelma & Louise (1991) on the rim above the Colorado near Dead Horse Point, Mission: Impossible II (2000) on the cliffs at Dead Horse Point, and the Marlboro campaigns whose viewpoint above the Shafer basin is still called Marlboro Point. The Museum of Moab covers the local end of the story.

What you actually see today. Main Street is a few blocks of outfitters, breweries, bike shops, galleries and motels, and it is genuinely busy from March to October. The serious attractions are all outside town. Utah State Route 128, the Upper Colorado River Scenic Byway, leaves U.S. 191 just north of Moab and follows the river upstream for 70 km through a red sandstone gorge past Big Bend, Castle Valley and the Fisher Towers - one of the most rewarding drives in the state, and free. Potash Road (SR 279) runs the other bank past petroglyph panels and rock-climbing walls to the Shafer switchbacks. The Slickrock Bike Trail on the sandstone above town, laid out in 1969 for motorcycles, remains the reference point for technical mountain biking in the United States, and Hell's Revenge and the Poison Spider Mesa track are the equivalents for four-wheel drives.

Practical notes. Arches National Park operates a timed-entry reservation requirement during the busy months, typically from spring into autumn for daytime arrivals, and it is booked separately from park admission - arriving without one and expecting to drive in during the middle of the day does not work. Accommodation prices in Moab peak sharply around the Easter Jeep Safari in spring and again in October. Water is the constraint on everything: carry four litres per person for a half-day walk and understand that afternoon thunderstorms between July and September send flash floods down slot canyons that were dry an hour earlier.

Getting there and timing. Canyonlands Regional Airport lies 30 km north; Grand Junction, Colorado, is about 180 km north-east and Salt Lake City around 380 km north-west. March to May and September to early November are the good months, with daytime highs between 18C and 28C. July averages above 37C. Winter is cold and often beautiful, with snow on the La Sals framing the red rock and hotel rates at their lowest of the year. For film pilgrims, the practical route is a single loop: SR 128 upstream past the Fisher Towers for the Ford country, then the Shafer rim above the Colorado for the Thelma & Louise and Mission: Impossible ground, then Arches for the Indiana Jones opening - about 200 km of driving in total.