The Planet Earth Online

We Live on a big, beautiful planet stocked with a great variety of scenery and landscape. It is a planet made for humans to live on, but most of it is covered by fields and mountains and deserts and oceans. It is a real planet full of living plants and animals, and a few billion people, each of which are unique and interesting. People have shaped the world in many ways, building houses and cities and farms. Roads, a man-made feature, criss-cross the whole earth, tying together its endless variety into one common network.

Since 1999, UntraveledRoad has been capturing the scenery of modern highways, mountain roads, city streets and trails, visiting places both exotic and familiar to create a photographic virtual world, where you can stop to look at wildflowers, lakes, mountain vistas, and read historic markers, all from the comfort of your computer chair. With 396,883 hand-held camera photographs, UntraveledRoad preserves a repository of beautiful scenery which you can explore at your leisure. If you want to see the beauty of National Parks, the serenity of an alpine wilderness, the solitude of the desert, or wander randomly along highways, it is waiting for you now at a mouseclick.

These virtual tours consist of stops along roads, streets and trails, where four pictures are taken, one in each direction. Each page shows an ahead-facing picture along with two side view thumbnails. You can turn in any direction, and proceed to the next stop. Where appropriate, extra pictures show high-resolution views of scenery, or historic and interpretative markers. Some complicated intersections include pictures for diagonal directions. To skip uneventful sections of roadway, a jump feature takes you to the next important town or intersection. See the legend at the bottom of this page for more information.

This page highlights only a few samples of the many explorations you can make on UntraveledRoad.

Temple Mountain

The San Rafael Swell in central Utah is a rugged desert terrain of cliffs, canyons and mesas. Formed by the uplifting of the earth, the area is faced by a wall of stone layers that protrude hundreds of feet into the air at a forty-five degree angle. It is a dramatic sight to behold. This is called the San Rafael Reef.

The reef and swell are a popular destination for four-wheeling, camping and hiking. Narrow canyons are lined by cliffs as much as 1000 feet tall. Numerous backcountry roads allow the exploration of this scenic area.

Tunnel Overlook

Canyon de Chelly is an oasis enclosed from the desert by red sandstone cliffs a thousand feet high. Native Americans have lived in Canyon de Chelly for thousands of years and still do today, Canyon de Chelly is actually a labyrinth of canyons which are as much as twenty miles long. Roads access the rims on the north and the south where visitors can overlook the amazing scenery. Numerous cliff dwellings were built anciently under the canyon rims.

Canyon de Chelly is part of the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation, and is administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Located in the vast deserts of northeast Arizona, it is away from the bustle of American life, and a chance to ponder past civilizations and other ways of life.

Dolores River Gorge

The Dolores River Gorge cuts through the remote plateaus of western Colorado, a country with 10,000 foot mountains, redrock cliffs, desert basins and few towns. Running northward from its sources in the San Juan Mountains, it scarecly passes through any level ground in its 100-mile path to the Colorado River.

Colorado Highway 141 crosses the Dolores River at Split Rock, and then rejoins it at its confluencs with the San Miguel River, and follows it to Gateway. This scenic drive begins with the highway on a ledge halfway up a cliff, then the highway descends to the canyon floor, rimmed by thousand-foot redrock cliffs on either side.

Gateway is so named because of its position at the entrance to the Dolores Gorge as well as the beautiful and unusual Unaweep Canyon, and is home to the Gateway Canyons Resort, where adventurers come to explore this scenic area.