A Gallup city park that features short hiking trails through spectacular red cliffs formed tens of millions of years ago. Red Rock Park is also home to one of America’s great Native American gatherings — the annual Gallup InterTribal Indian Ceremonial held each August; and to an annual Balloon Festival held each December.

An area inhabited for more than 4,000 years — longer than anywhere else on the Colorado plateau. Awesome sheer cliff walls enclose a regular water source that has supported the Navajo/ Diné people and agricultural activities for more than a thousand years.

Another only-in-New Mexico landscape, El Malpais (el-mal-pie-EES) was formed by the region’s volcanic activity millions of years ago. Explore a landscape both eerie and alluring with lava flows, cinder cones, lava tube caves, sandstone bluffs. And if you’re there after dark the night skies can be incredible!

Spanish conquistadors passed this way in the 16^th century and left their mark on this famous rock to prove it. Over the centuries ancestral Natives, Spanish explorers and American pioneers carved over 2,000 signatures and petroglyphs here because the area provided a rare place to rest with a year-round water source across an otherwise dry landscape. Lots of history passed here.

Bizarre is the word that usually comes to mind when describing the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness. Crazy shapes, petrified wood, hoodoos were formed by eons of erosion. The Navajo name, Bisti (Bis-tie) translates to shale hills. De-Na-Zin (Deh-nah-zin) is the word for cranes. However you say it, it’s a curious site indeed.

The region’s earliest indigenous inhabitants settled this middle-of-nowhere site in the first millennium and constructed massive multi-floor pueblos before mysteriously abandoning the site a couple of hundred years later. Truly awe-inspiring, Chaco Canyon has been designated a World Heritage Site.

Towering nearly 1,500 feet high this iconic western rock was formed when ancient volcanos in the area erupted 30 million years ago. The Diné people revere the peak as a sacred site with a legend that tells of a giant bird that carried their ancestors here before turning into the great rock formation we know today.