15 Incredible United States Destinations That Will Make You Feel Like You’re on Another Planet
When you want a journey out of the ordinary, the United States has awe-inspiring landscapes that seem a world away. These are incredible places to experience nature’s masterpieces.
Each of these destinations is unique and produces experiences with each one that seem so different from the other, that you end up with such unforgettable memories. So let’s discover some of the most astonishing places that feel like they should be on another planet.
Utah — Bryce Canyon National Park
Bryce Canyon is known for its bizarre hoodoos—tall, thin spires of rock that tower above the canyon floor—and they give an alien sense of scale to the entire place. At sunrise and sunset, the park’s stunning red, orange, and white rock formations look just like a Martian land. This feels like wandering through a jungle of alien worlds.
The Wave, Arizona
Step into a surreal painting and you’ll realize that The Wave in Arizona is akin to an almost swirling, wave-like rock formation with hypnotic patterns. The sandstone structure changes color depending on lighting throughout the day, from bold reds to softer pink and orange. The angles and color palette are so accentuated that it’s actually like an abstract, extraterrestrial art installation.
Wyoming’s Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone
Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring is a natural hot spring of astounding colors and it looks more like a nebula than a pool. Thermophilic bacteria in its extreme temperatures give the vivid rings of blue, green, yellow, and orange. From above it looks like something out of an intergalactic vista.
New Mexico, White Sands National Park
The gypsum sand, which glows white-bright under the sun, renders this surreal desert a snowy tundra of sorts, amassed in the middle of the desert. When walking on the sparkling, cool sand dunes as they stretch to the horizon, you may feel like you’re on an icy, foreign planet. Sunrise and sunset are especially beautiful in this landscape.
Arizona & Utah Monument Valley
Monument Valley is a frontier from another world, an empty vast expanse dotted with towering sandstone buttes. The sights of many iconic films and instantly recognizable, its iconic red rock formations are known far and wide. Here, on the silence and raw, unearthly beauty, it feels like you are on Mars
South Dakota – Badlands National Park
Badlands National Park is a fossil-laden landscape with its jagged peaks, layered rock formations, and eerie barren terrain that feels like another era. The layers of earth are so colorful and so sharply defined that they are eerie and beautiful, even alien. It’s a good spot to step back in time or step onto another planet.
Painted Hills – Oregon
The Painted Hills are appropriately named: The rolling land here, in layers upon layers, shows a surreal palette of red, yellow, and black resulting from volcanic ash deposits. Light and moisture affect the colors of the hills, so they change with the light and feel like a living canvas. It looks more like an exotic, alien landscape than anything else.
Devils Tower – Wyoming
It rises up out of the earth like a stone monolith, towering over 1,200 feet tall. Its odd grooves and striking isolation make it seem like a structure built by extraterrestrial beings, aged thousands, if not millions, of years. Devils Tower is a sacred Native American site and a mysterious, awe-inspiring wonder.
Antelope Canyon – Arizona
Famous for its walls and beams of sunlight that come together to make a mesmerizing play of light and shadow, this narrow slot canyon gets its name from the long, straight beam that shines through it. Year after year of water erosion has sculpted the red sandstone into twisted and turned shapes that look as if they belong in a science fiction movie. Traversing the canyon is like walking a cavern on some distant planet.
Bonneville Salt Flats – Utah
The Bonneville Salt Flats are 30,000 acres wide, flat, white, and reflective, giving the illusion of an endless mirror. The flats, when covered in a thin layer of water, are a perfect, glass-like surface, reflecting the sky in such a way that it feels like you’re walking on air. This is something out of this world.
Paradise Meadows, Washington – Mount Rainier
Paradise Meadows, near Mount Rainier’s summit, becomes a wildflower garden in summer, with towering snowcapped peaks like a garden from a distant world. The combination of the bright meadows with the blue skies and shimmering mountain views is surreal, a blend of snow and bloom. It feels almost dreamlike, the sheer beauty and vibrance here.
California – Joshua Tree National Park
The high desert park here has its iconic Joshua trees and alien-like rock formations, a surreal, almost eerie landscape. The desert skies at night are alive with stars, so it’s easy to imagine you’re on a strange desert planet. It only makes sense with its otherworldly charm in its twisted, unusual shapes of trees and rocks.
Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes National Park
The sprawling sandscapes hidden beneath rugged mountain ranges are home to North America’s tallest sand dunes. You’ll get an alien desert with patches of sudden green juxtaposed against snowcapped peaks. Hiking these endless dunes evokes a sense of isolation, a feeling of being a solitary figure beneath a vast, sun-drenched sky.
Oregon — Crater Lake National Park
Crater Lake is a deep, pure blue, nearly perfect symmetry formed by the collapse of an ancient volcano. The lake is so deep and clear that its color is intensely extreme. The lake is still isolated and feels like a hidden gem on a far-off world.
California, Sequoia National Park
Sequoia National Park is home to the world’s largest trees; a place that feels like a prehistoric era or the home of an alien forest. Massive, ancient presence fills the towering sequoias, whose trunks are as big as their presence. Walking among these giants is like walking into a woodland that belongs to its own time and space.
Disclaimer: This list is solely the author’s opinion based on research and publicly available information.
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Even if you’ve been on a safari in the past, an African photo safari is something you want to experience or at the very list add to the top of your bucket list.
But first, what is a photo safari? The phrase “photo safari” is not a common sentence structure but its meaning can be deduced easily. An African photo safari in general context means going on an adventure with the sole purpose of taking high-quality pictures.
10 Best African Photo Safaris You Must Experience
