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.

Blue Mountain Road

The Abajo Mountains rise above the diverse terrain of southeastern Utah to a height of 11,360 feet. Alpine forests cover their slopes and numerous mountain roads wander over their many ridges and canyons. From the peak, you can overlook the farmlands of Montezuma Valley to the west, the deserts of Arizona to the south and the chasms of Canyonlands and the Colorado River to the north and west.

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.

Artists Drive

In spite of being the hottest and driest place in America, nearly a million people visit Death Valley yearly. The climate is so severe that almost no plant life can survive, But the alien landscape and quiet and solitude provide an appeal that many more beautiful places do not. Much of Death Valley is below sea level, bottoming out at 282 at Badwater Basin. The highest recorded temperature was 134 degrees. With these extremes, you feel like you've been somewhere unusual.

Death Valley features a number of interesting places to visit including the colorful Artists Drive and Mustard Canyon, historic places like the Harmony Borax Works and the overlook at Dante's View. Escape the stress of modern life with a visit to this faraway place.