🐴 Dead Horse Point: What You Will Find

Dead Horse Point is not a national park but a Utah state park. It is small, can be walked in a morning, and has one of the best viewpoints on the whole Colorado Plateau.

It lies by the town of Moab, a short way from the turning into Canyonlands, and most people drop in here "for an hour" on the way somewhere else. Then they stand there for two.

The Viewpoint

The promontory runs out into space and ends over six hundred metres above the Colorado. Below it the river makes an almost complete loop — it flows all the way round a tongue of rock and comes back to nearly the same place.

At this distance you see the whole geology of the region at once: horizontal layers of sandstone like the floors of a building, and between them terraces formed because each layer crumbles at a different rate. In good weather you can see eighty kilometres from here, as far as the La Sal mountains.

It is strongest at sunrise. The canyon faces in such a way that the first light reaches the far walls first and only then descends to the river, so the valley lights up from the top down over about twenty minutes.

Where the Name Comes From

The promontory is joined to the rest of the plateau by a neck about thirty metres wide. That is so narrow that fencing it off gives you a corral of many hectares that nothing can leave.

According to local tradition that is exactly how cowboys used it in the nineteenth century: they drove a herd of wild mustangs up here, blocked the neck with branches and picked out the animals they wanted. The rest, it is said, they left where they were, and those could not get out of the corral.

The horses on the promontory died of thirst within sight of the river running six hundred metres below them. Whether it really happened that way is not documented anywhere — but that is the name of the place.

Blue Lakes That Do Not Belong There

If you look south-west from the viewpoint, you will see deep blue rectangles down in the desert. They look like a photomontage and they are the evaporation ponds of a potash mine — the potassium salt that fertiliser is made from.

The salt is dissolved underground with water, the solution is pumped up and left to evaporate. And because evaporation is faster when the water absorbs more of the sun's heat, it is dyed blue. So the colour has nothing to do with the mineral — it is an accelerant.

Beside them an abandoned piece of landscape is left, with tracks nobody drives on any more. From six hundred metres up the whole thing looks like one large abstract painting.

That Film

In 1991 the final scene of Thelma and Louise was shot here — the one where the car goes over the edge.

The film claims it is the Grand Canyon. It is not the Grand Canyon and never was; the production picked Dead Horse Point because you can see more at once from here and because you can drive equipment up. Anyone who knows the scene recognises the place at once.

The opening climbing sequence of the second Mission: Impossible was also shot here, though that was on a different rock nearby.

Darkness

Since 2016 Dead Horse Point has been listed as a dark sky park. Moab is far enough away and small enough for that to work.

The viewpoint is open all night, and in summer two things happen at once: the Milky Way overhead, and six hundred metres below the occasional single light — the head torch of somebody driving the White Rim Road.

Practicalities

Admission is paid separately; the national park pass is not valid here — it is a state park, a different till.

Water is brought in by tanker, so it cannot always be topped up at the campground or the viewpoint; count on bringing your own. There is no shade.

And anyone arriving by bike has the Intrepid Trail System here: around thirty kilometres of loops along the rim of the plateau, which are among the easiest terrain around Moab — which says more about Moab than about the trails.