The Colorado through Moab.

There are two, going opposite directions from US-191. SR-128, the Upper Colorado River Scenic Byway, runs 44 miles upstream to the northeast past Castle Valley, the Fisher Towers and the remains of the Dewey Bridge, and it is the finest drive in Grand County. SR-279, Potash Road, runs 17 miles downstream to the southwest beneath a continuous cliff, carrying petroglyph pullouts, a dinosaur track viewing station and the Corona Arch trailhead. Neither charges anything and neither has fuel or a shop on it.

It depends entirely on the stretch. The mild daily run through the Fisher Towers country and the flatwater below town do not require a rationed permit, and most visitors do them with an outfitter who handles the paperwork. Westwater Canyon requires a permit every day of the year, released through Recreation.gov two months ahead of the launch date at 8am Mountain, taken first come with no lottery, and non-refundable. Cataract Canyon below the confluence runs on a separate National Park Service river permit.

Between 1 April and 30 September private use is limited to five permits or 75 people per day, whichever comes first. From 1 October through 31 March that rises to seven permits or 150 people per day. Westwater is 17 miles of Class IV water and is the first genuine whitewater stretch of the Colorado in Utah. Permits are non-refundable and there is no lottery, so the release two months out is where the competition happens. The BLM Moab Field Office on 435-259-2100 handles current conditions.

It burned in April 2008. The bridge was built in 1916, ran 502 feet, and was the longest suspension bridge in Utah, carrying SR-128 across the Colorado about 28 miles up the byway from Moab. A child playing with matches in the campground beside it started a brush fire that destroyed every wooden part of the structure, including the full-length wooden deck. The towers and cables survive and the site is still a stop on the byway, with interpretive signage explaining what stood there.

On SR-279, Potash Road, downstream from town, at a signed viewing station just past the parking for the Poison Spider trail. The lower slab carries the tracks of at least ten different meat-eating dinosaurs, ranging in size from 17 inches to five feet at the hip. About five miles in from the US-191 junction, marked pullouts on the same road sit below several panels of prehistoric petroglyphs on the cliff above. Both are on BLM land, both are signed, and neither costs anything.

No, and that surprises people given the name and the size of it. Corona Arch is on BLM land off SR-279, about ten miles down Potash Road from the US-191 junction, reached on a three mile round trip that includes a short ladder and a length of cable handline across sloping rock. There is no gate, no fee and no reservation. Bowtie Arch sits beside it. The route crosses an active railway line at the start, the track that serves the potash operation further down the road.

The residue of a uranium mill that operated on the north bank of the Colorado immediately upstream of town from the 1950s, leaving roughly sixteen million tons of residual radioactive material on the floodplain. The Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action project has been hauling it by rail to an engineered disposal cell at Crescent Junction thirty miles north, and on 9 April 2026 marked the removal of the full sixteen million tons. About a million tons of contaminated soil and debris remain to follow it.

Not from the river. The city's culinary supply comes entirely from the Glen Canyon Group aquifer, drawn from springs and deep wells. A 2020 estimate published in the Journal of Hydrology put annual recharge to the deep portion of that aquifer at under 4,000 acre feet, against roughly 3,600 acre feet already withdrawn each year across all the entities using it. That arithmetic is the constraint underneath every growth and development argument in the valley, and it is why conservation here is a rule rather than a suggestion.

Late spring through early autumn for most trips, with the character of the water changing sharply across that window. Snowmelt drives high flows in late spring, which makes the whitewater bigger and the mild stretches faster, and by late summer levels drop and the trips get gentler and warmer. Outfitters run through the season and fill in the same weeks the lodging does, which is March through May and September through October. Check flows with the BLM Moab Field Office before any private launch.