3 Best Sights in Blanding, Moab and Southeastern Utah

Behind what is one of the nation's foremost museums dedicated to the Ancestral Puebloan culture, an interpretive trail leads to a village that they once inhabited. Portions have been partially excavated, and visitors can climb down a ladder into a 1,000-year-old ceremonial room called a kiva. The museum displays a variety of pots, baskets, spear points, and other rare artifacts. There's even a sash made from the colorful feathers of a scarlet macaw, a bird native to Mexico or Central America, which proves the vast distances indigenous trade routes spanned. 

Life-size dino replicas in dramatic poses will delight kids. The small museum also features many skeletons, fossils, and footprints—and reportedly the world's largest collection of movie posters starring Godzilla and other monsters dating back to the early days of film.

One of the West's most famous rock-art sites, about 15 miles west of U.S. 191, this site contains Native American designs engraved on the rock over the course of 2,000 years. Early pioneers and explorers to the region named the site Newspaper Rock because they believed the rock, crowded with drawings, constituted a written language with which early people communicated. Archaeologists now agree that the petroglyphs do not represent language.