Rushmore, Yellowstone and the canyon, in one long loop

Few regions on earth pack this much geology and history into a single overland route. A loop through the American West can start at a carved mountain in South Dakota, cross a plateau still shaped by one of the world's largest volcanic systems, drop through red-rock canyon country, and finish at the edge of a mile-deep gorge, all without repeating a landscape twice.

A mountain carved with intent

Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota's Black Hills, was carved between 1927 and 1941 under sculptor Gutzon Borglum, its granite face shaped into the likenesses of Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln. It is worth knowing, alongside the scale of the achievement, that the Black Hills themselves were guaranteed to the Lakota Sioux by an 1868 treaty, before gold was discovered there in the 1870s and the land was taken regardless. In 1980 the United States Supreme Court ruled the seizure illegal and ordered compensation, which the Lakota have declined to accept, seeking the return of the land itself rather than payment for it. The monument and the dispute over the ground it sits on are, in a real sense, part of the same story.

Little Bighorn, and what came after

A short distance from Rushmore, in Montana, the Little Bighorn Battlefield marks the site of the U.S. Army's defeat in 1876 by a combined force of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors, led among others by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and roughly two hundred and ten of his men were killed. The victory proved short-lived for the Native nations involved: within a year, sustained military pressure had forced most of the bands present at Little Bighorn onto reservations. The battlefield today includes memorials to both sides, a deliberate change from earlier decades when only the army's dead were formally commemorated.

Yellowstone and the parks beyond it

West from Montana, the route enters Yellowstone, the world's first national park, designated in 1872, sitting atop one of the largest active volcanic systems on the continent. Its geysers, hot springs and mud pots are surface evidence of that system, and Old Faithful, the best known of its geysers, still erupts on a broadly predictable schedule, though the intervals vary rather more than the name suggests.

From Yellowstone the route typically continues south through Grand Teton National Park and into the desert country of Utah and Arizona. Arches and Canyonlands, both near Moab, showcase sandstone eroded into freestanding arches and deep river canyons, shaped over tens of millions of years by wind, water and the slow collapse of weaker rock beneath harder layers. Mesa Verde, further south, holds the best-preserved ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings in the country, multi-storey stone structures built into sheltered alcoves in the canyon walls around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, before being abandoned, for reasons still debated among archaeologists, toward the end of that period. Monument Valley, straddling the Arizona-Utah border on Navajo Nation land, adds the sandstone buttes familiar from decades of film and photography, before the route finally reaches the Grand Canyon itself, carved by the Colorado River over some six million years to a depth exceeding a mile in places.

Two ways to cover the ground

Both operators running this circuit follow broadly the same route with slightly different pacing. The National Parks, Mount Rushmore and Little Big Horn tour runs sixteen days from Denver to Las Vegas, taking in Rushmore, Little Bighorn, Yellowstone, the Utah parks, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Zion. The Epic Wonders of the National Parks itinerary covers similar ground over the same span, with a slightly different order and the option of extending in Las Vegas at the end.

When the roads are actually open

This is not a trip that works year-round. Many of the high-altitude roads through Yellowstone and the surrounding parks close under snow from late autumn until May, and the whole route is built around a window from roughly May to September when everything on the itinerary is reliably accessible. Summer brings the largest crowds at the best-known viewpoints, but it also brings certainty: nothing on this route is worth risking a closed road for.