Woman who visited all 50 states includes Four Corners Monument on list of most overrated tourist spots

A woman who visited all 50 states just dropped her list of America’s seven most overrated tourist spots, and Colorado made the cut, not for anything in Denver, not for a 14er or a ski resort, but for the Four Corners Monument. You know, the place where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico meet, where you pay money to stand on a cement slab in the middle of the desert, take a picture with one limb in each state, and then drive three hours back to civilization wondering why you did that.

To be fair, she’s not entirely wrong. The Four Corners Monument is operated by the Navajo Nation, and the experience is essentially: you arrive, you wait in line, you crouch on a bronze disk embedded in concrete, someone takes a photo, and that’s it. There’s no visitor center revelation, no breathtaking overlook, no gift shop selling anything you actually want. It’s a geographic novelty that takes about four minutes to experience after a drive that takes four hours from basically anywhere. For Coloradans, it’s roughly a six-hour haul from Denver through some of the most beautiful scenery in the state, Durango, Cortez, Mesa Verde, only to arrive at a concrete platform and think, “Huh. Okay. So that’s it.” The journey is legitimately better than the destination.

The rest of the list includes the Las Vegas Strip (she recommends Fremont Street instead — same energy, half the price), Times Square (no explanation needed), Mount Rushmore (which has disappointed road-trippers since the dawn of road trips), Bourbon Street in New Orleans (Frenchmen Street is the move, for what it’s worth), the southernmost point in Key West (it’s literally just a statue) and Salem, Massachusetts, which she says is fine as long as you avoid October, when every amateur witch in America descends on it simultaneously.

So if you’re planning a Labor Day road trip and someone in the car suggests “let’s go to Four Corners,” maybe just keep driving to Mesa Verde instead. It’s an actual UNESCO World Heritage Site with 600-year-old cliff dwellings, and nobody has to crouch on concrete. Colorado has plenty of legitimately incredible tourist spots, and exactly one where you pay to stand on a slab.