Although Utah may have only around a million and a half residents, the upstanding, prosperous, clean­living and decidedly conservative citizens of this striking state, acquired from Mexico at the end of the Mexican­American War in 1868, live in a region richly, almost spectacularly endowed with preserved, protected natural splendour. No American state can claim as much national parkland within its borders, nor so much within easy reach of them.

Leaving aside, for a moment, the 10 Utah parks, the less commercialised North Rim of one of the seven natural wonders of the world ­ northern Arizona‘s Grand Canyon (declared a national park in 1919) ­ is a short drive from Kanab, Utah. And while the northwestern portion of Wyoming is home to Grand Teton National Park, visited by three million people a year, its closest major airport happens to be Salt Lake City.

To really stretch the point, the grand dame of them all, Yellowstone National Park, which is seven times the size of Grand Teton and is also in Wyoming, with small spillovers into Idaho and Montana, is a little over 500 kilometres from the same airport, along good highways.

You don‘t need to be surrounded by the imposing Mormon edifices of a city and state settled by persecuted pioneers of extraordinary determination more than a century and a half ago to get the feeling that this is God‘s Country. On the edge of the Rocky Mountains in the northeast, with vast stretches of desert to the west and one of the largest bodies of water on the continent, it is certainly not short of grandeur, often epic grandeur. Dinosaurs once strode these lands and whatever took them out, they can‘t have left voluntarily.

For those inclined toward ecology, geology or just the joy of the great outdoors, this is almost sensory overload. Deep canyons and gorges, twisting waters, red rocks, sheer granite peaks, rocky spurs, pine forests, fossilised trees, plunging waterfalls, eroded arches and, by the time you get to Yellowstone, boiling geysers and mud, provide the physical backdrop to a natural realm of astonishing diversity.

If one were to pursue the Japanese style of checklist tourism, the list would have to include grey foxes, chipmunks, coyotes, prairie dogs, beavers, snakes and muskrats. Larger species include bison, elk, deer, pronghorn, black bears, grizzly bears, wild sheep and cougars. Then add innumerable fish and about 300 bird species.

While Utah‘s 10 parks are mostly in the south of the state they are certainly not just 10 portions of the same pie, and they account for some of the most breathtaking scenery in America. There are distinct and enticing qualities to each of them.

The five best known, forming, along with the Grand Canyon‘s north rim, a well marketed Grand Circle, are Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park and Capitol Reef National Park. The others, just as worthy of exploration, are Natural Bridges National Monument, the Glen Canyon National Recreation Centre, Cedar Breaks, Dinosaur National Monument (partly in Colorado) and Rainbow Bridge. Then there is the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park and, just over the border into Nevada, the cavefestooned Great Basin National Park.

Old hands suggest a week to 10 days to properly experience them all, though few visitors allocate the time, and that doesn‘t include the treasures of Wyoming. "The snowcapped, snaggletoothed Grand Tetons are America‘s quintessential mountain range, rearing up with cartoonish exaggeration out of the sagebrush­covered flats of Jackson Hole, Wyoming", goes the particularly persuasive pitch of that state‘s tourism body.

One thing you don抰 hear as often, particularly not in Utah, is the derivation of the name tetons. It seems some French­Canadian trappers, away from the comforts of home for longer than they would have wished, saw in the upthrusted, pointed, snow­capped peaks in their constant gaze the outline of a woman‘s breasts.

Zion National Park is the only canyon in the country able to be entirely explored by foot or behind a wheel. They canyon has been carved over an estimated 225 million years by the headwaters of the Virgin River (no Richard Branson franchise known).

The colours displayed on the rocky, eroded shapes of cathedrals, statues and monuments vary by the season and even the hour, from off­white to orange, vivid red and deep violet. The biblically inspired canyon name is not observed by Native Americans, who prefer Mukuntuweap.

Inhabited since around the sixth century by Anasazi, Pueblo and Paiunte tribes, the park bears the marks of this indigenous presence, with some of its most spectacular peaks bearing such names as Temple of Sinawava and Mountain of the Sun.

Bryce Canyon National Park seems to win most of the beauty contest crowns, with its huge rock formations often compared to those of the Grand Canyon. It lies east of the Paunsaugunt Plateau (Country of the Beavers), a limestone mesa around 2500 metres above sea level. Canyonlands offers vast, ochreshaded cliffs standing sentinel over the serpentine windings of the Green and Colorado Rivers. Described as a "rocky maze cut out by 300 million years of erosion", its most notable panoramas are from Dead Horse Point and Needles Overlook. With only 40 kilometres of surfaced roads, expeditions around Bryce require a four­wheel­drive vehicle, a horse or a good pair of hiking boots.

Red sandstone spurs and dramatic stone arches highlight Arches National Park, with the Park Avenue corridor feature said to resemble its New York namesake. The precariously poised Balanced Rock is a principal photographer‘s stop.

Capitol Reef National Park takes its name from the rounded, rocky domes that reminded its early European visitors of the Capitol building in Washington. With limited and difficult access in its interior, this park, with its enormous mountain wall, provided refuge to Butch Cassidy, The Sundance Kid and their Wild Bunch after bank raids, as did Brown‘s Hole near the Colorado border in Dinosaur National Monument.

Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, where the blue waters of Lake Powell lap multi­hued cliffs, specialises in all manner of water sports, with boat journeys available to Rainbow Bridge and its 88 metre­high natural rock arch. At the small and wild Natural Bridges National Monument, three mighty rock arches span two tributaries of the Colorado River ­ Kachina Bridge, Owachomo Bridge and Sipapu Bridge.

Nature raw and real is in such abundance throughout Utah it is sometimes possible to forget you‘re in an intensely settled industrial nation of more than 250 million people. This is where Americans (and a great many others) find an essential connection to things elemental. Like the Great Rift Valley of Africa it is where nature抯 hand has drawn powerful and perplexing patterns.