Founded in the late 1800s, MOAB was hardly a speck until the 1950s, when prospector Charlie Steen discovered uranium in the nearby hills. When the ensuing mining boom finally waned, the conservative hold of Moab's industrialists and landowners waned with it, and the town threw in its lot with tourism. In barely ten years, it has transformed itself into the Southwest's number one adventure-vacation destination.

Moab still isn't a large town - the population has yet to reach ten thousand - and neither is it an attractive one. The setting is what matters. With two national parks on its doorstep, plus millions more acres of public land, Moab is an ideal base for outdoors enthusiasts. At first, it was a mecca for mountain bikers , lured by the legendary Slickrock Bike Trail . Then the jeep drivers began to turn up, and the whitewater rafting companies moved in. These days it's almost literally bursting, all year, with legions of Lycra-clad vacationers from all over the world.

Perhaps the main reason Moab has grown so fast is that out-of-state visitors tend to find Utah's other rural communities so irredeemably boring. As soon as Moab emerged from the pack, it became a beacon in the desert, attracting tourists ecstatic to find a town that stayed up after dark. Moab amounts to little more than a few miles of motels, restaurants and bars, but that's enough to make it the only southern-Utah town where you can stay for a week and still feel that you haven't seen everything, and everyone, a dozen times. The only sight-seeing to speak of is provided by the Moab Skyway , an incongruous new chairlift that climbs a thousand feet above town to the northern tip of the Moab Rim, for superb views across the Colorado to Arches and beyond (daily 9am-9pm; $8).