Oh, and lest we forget Yosemite National Park. There’s the drive along the PCH and Big Sur, leading in the wine country of the Central Coast and up into San Francisco, a city that owes its aesthetic to cliffside views and curlicues of fog. Then move inland to the moon-like desertscapes in the Mojave. Start in the south with the expansive, natural beaches set against towering cliffs. But how many beautiful things do you know that don’t? So let’s drop the talk of droughts, bankruptcy, and traffic and talk for a minute about how this state has EVERY SINGLE KIND OF BEAUTY you could possibly want. Lincoln City Beach | Ray Whittemore/Shutterstock Few people venture into Wyoming to see just how the light shimmers off gold Aspen trees on a limitless mountain prairie - and folks in the Cowboy State like that just fine.
That's not to mention Red Canyon, the Red Desert, Devils Tower, or pronghorn populations (you probably know them as antelope, but they're actually pronghorn) that number in the hundreds of thousands, plus elk, moose, and bison. But if all you've ever seen of Wyoming is Jackson Hole and I-80, you're missing out on the other-worldly high plains outside of Laramie and Cheyenne, the ghostly rocks of Vedauwoo, the mountains of the Front Range (the same mountains you saw on your trip to Denver), the Wind River Range, the Bighorns, and some of the darkest night skies with the brightest Milky Way in the lower 48. Wyoming is so rich with beauty that even the Grand Tetons - quite possibly the single most dramatic vista in the country - somehow get overshadowed by Yellowstone National Park right next door. How do you pick, after all, between desert vs. We independently ranked the states, then came together around a table to debate the discrepancies, and to plead for the divisive cases, of which there were several. And that more than a few are downright boggling in their physical gifts. We came to realize that every state has something to recommend it. We assembled a crew of writers who combined had visited every state, and then set about arguing: weighing the variety, quantity, concentration, highlights, and lowlights of every state's physique. One state has cocaine-white beaches, another one has thousand-year-old redwoods. States who think their granite mountains are sexier than someone else's red-rock deserts. Not that we feel the need to brag about it or anything.Īmong the states, naturally, there's bound to be some sibling rivalry. Perhaps there are grander fjords in Norway, taller mountains in the Himalayas, and greener waters in the Caribbean, but nowhere has it all quite like America. In addition to being the world leader in just about everything, the United States of America is also, without a doubt, the most physically beautiful country in the world.