How to plan scenic routes from start to finish

What to take away

• Pick the corridor first, then the stops. Doing it the other way produces a zigzag.
• Road type decides everything else: vehicle, season, timing and how many stops fit.
• Most designated routes publish their own length, surface and best season. Read those pages.
• Plan the exits. A scenic route without a bail-out point is a commitment, not a drive.

A scenic route is a corridor with a personality, not a line between two towns. Planning one well means deciding what kind of driving you want, confirming the road can deliver it in the month you are travelling, and then hanging stops off that spine. The order matters. Almost every ruined scenic day starts with a list of places and a route reverse-engineered to reach them.

Step one: choose the corridor

Start from a designated route rather than an improvised one, at least for your first pass. Designated byways come with published descriptions, which removes most of the guesswork. The Bureau of Land Management says it manages 54 Back Country Byways covering nearly 3,000 miles, graded Type I through Type IV according to the kind of vehicle they suit, and that Arizona's four are free to drive. That grading is the single most useful number in route planning, because it tells you in one word whether your car belongs there.

Step two: match the road to the vehicle and the month

Read the route page for three things: length, surface and best season. A sixty-mile high-clearance loop is a full day, not an afternoon detour. A graded gravel route that is fine in June may be impassable in March. If the page does not state a season, call the managing office. Do not infer it from photographs.

Step three: hang stops off the spine

Now add stops, and keep them within a short distance of the corridor.

• Two anchor stops that justify the drive.
• Two or three short stops of ten to twenty minutes.
• One meal stop with a confirmed alternative.
• One optional stop you are happy to drop.

Wildlife refuges make useful anchors because many carry purpose-built driving loops. The Fish and Wildlife Service notes that refuge tour routes are generally open sunrise to sunset and describes examples such as the twelve-mile auto loop at Bosque del Apache in New Mexico. Those hours matter more than they look, because sunrise to sunset is a shorter window in November than in June.

Step four: build the timetable backwards

Fix your arrival time at the far end first, then work back. Add a third again to any mapping estimate on unpaved routes. Decide where you are at midday and where you are at dusk. Driving an unfamiliar gravel route in the dark is the thing to design out.

Pacing is its own discipline, and the biggest mistake is packing a full day into a route that deserves a slow one. Our guide to planning a scenic drive without rushing it sets out how much slack a route actually needs.

Step five: plan the exits and the fallback

Write down where you can leave the route early, where fuel is, and where you would sleep if you stopped halfway. Note the last point with cell service. Then price the plan honestly against the transport, stays and ticket costs it implies. A route that looks free often is not, once beds and fuel are counted.

Common questions

How long should a first scenic route be? Under a hundred miles of scenic driving in a day, less if the surface is unpaved. Distance is not the point of the exercise.

Do I need a special vehicle? It depends on the route type. Many byways are fine in an ordinary car; others state high clearance or four-wheel drive as a requirement.

How do I know a route is open? Check the managing office's page for the route close to your travel date, and phone if the page is undated or ambiguous.

Should I drive it in both directions? If time allows, yes. Light and views differ noticeably, and one direction usually has better pull-offs than the other.