Located just 50 miles from the famous Zion National Park in the southwesternmost tip of Utah, Snow Canyon State Park often gets overlooked by visitors to the area. Locals, however, have been flocking to Snow Canyon since it opened in 1959, attracted by its breathtaking natural beauty, which is every bit as majestic as Zion’s—but way less crowded. “After getting to hike like this," a guide told me, gesturing out at the deserted expanse when I visited recently, "it's hard to want to go to Zion."

On a recent visit, I hiked to the top of three peaks over the span of a few hours, covering most of the park’s attractions, including the characteristic creamy white and burnt orange Navajo sandstone formations also found in Zion. If we’d had set out 183 million years ago, we would have stepped into a vast desert: Over many millennia, wind cemented the quartzite sand into petrified dunes, leaving behind the swirling lines etched into the stone. It is both humbling and awe-inspiring to look out at the burnt-orange rock, and be able to make out patterns of winds that blew through the area many millions of years ago. While these rock formations make up the majority of the park, there are still patches of desert sand—in pristine white, and otherworldly orange—waiting to be whipped into stone. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to walk on Mars, this would be a good place to start. (In fact, just a few hours northeast is Mars Desert Research Station, which serves as an analog environment for astronauts training to go into space.)

As close as you can get to Mars...without a spaceship. Photo by Hayley Phelan

Bounding up one of Snow Canyon’s red rock, you’re likely to come across a large pool of Moqui marbles, which bear a striking resemblance to the formations found on Mars in 2004 and dubbed the “Martian blueberries" and are essentially spherical iron concretions pushed out of the softer sandstone over time. The idea that Moqui marbles are somehow other-worldly is not a new one: Shamans and other mystics have incorporated the stones into rituals for centuries, and they are believed by many to have healing powers.

Elsewhere in the park, there are wild sage bushes (rub the narrow branches between your fingers to get an aromatic whiff), cacti, and narrow leaf yucca. Though not much to look at, the area’s cryptobiotic soil (delicate communities of living organisms which provide vital functions to the park’s ecology) will excite biology nerds and environmentalists—it’s also the reason why you must stay on the marked trails, lest you accidentally crush an entire community of it. The park also boasts a lava tube, a cave-like structure formed when an underground tube of lava cooled some hundreds of thousand years ago.

On the same trip to Utah, I also visited Zion. Though the National Park is certainly a sight to behold, I found I enjoyed Snow Canyon more. Perhaps it was the lack of crowds, or the fact that a day pass is half the price, but there was something about Snow Canyon that seemed imbued with an extra sense of serenity and peacefulness. Maybe there’s something to those Moqui marbles, after all...