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.

Sun Valley Road

Sun Valley is a world-class ski resort and one of the premier all-season resorts in America where celebrities and millionaires make their home. Enjoying a beautiful location in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, it is surrounded by the beauty of nature with mountain creeks and forested slopes.

The old mining town Ketchum borders Sun Valley on the west and has become the shopping center for the area with its few streets packed with shops of all kinds, targeting tourists, as well as museums and other places of interest.

Trail Creek Road, continuing northeast from Sun Valley, makes a dramatic climb up the side of the Pioneer Mountain Range and crosses a pass high in the mountains where creeks, alpine meadows and rocky mountain peaks are everywhere. It continues on to the Lost River Valley.

Yosemite Falls

Yosemite Valley is one of the most beautiful places on earth for a vacation destination. At 4,000 feet in the Sierra Nevadas, it is covered with alpine meadows and forests, with the Merced River running through the middle. Granite cliffs line the valley, reaching as high as 3,000 feet above the floor, giving it its patented, stunning scenery. Numerous waterfalls tumble from the heights; and formations, such as El Capitan and Half Dome, are famous icons.

Beyond Yosemite Valley, the towering peaks of the Sierra Nevadas reach into the 13,000-foot range, capped by Mount Whitney on the park's eastern boundary. Mount Whitney is the highest point in the continental United States 151; at 14,491 feet in elevation. Yosemite National Park includes hundreds of thousands of acres of alpine paradise amongst those peaks, with brooks wandering through grass and forest and monolithic granite peaks as a backdrop.

Explore Yosemite's beautiful scenery and plan your vacation to this unique mountain paradise. Yosemite Valley was photographed in May, when the waterfalls were at their maximum flow, the grass was green, and the wildflowers were out.

Bear Lake Valley

Between the ridges of the Rocky Mountains on the Idaho-Utah border, lie the turquoise waters of Bear Lake, surrounded by swampy grasslands and sagebrush-covered hills. At 5,923 feet in elevation, it is just a notch lower than the 9,000-foot Bear River Mountains immediately west of it. After boating on the 18-mile long lake, you can picnic in the beautiful canyons, hike in the mountain forests and tour the picturesque ranching towns of the valley.

The Oregon Trail ran through the north end of Bear Lake Valley, and Mormon settlers arrived in the 1860's. Don't miss the beautiful Paris Tabernacle, built in 1889, which seats four times the population of the town. Go spelunking in Minnetonka Cave or Paris Ice Cave.

Along the east shore of the lake, resorts and retirement communities have sprung up, with million-dollar "cabins" overlooking the lake. In the summer, visitors to the lake can exceed the population of the valley by several times.