The drive and the views
I have been driving the backroads of this valley for more than forty years, and I still tell people the same thing: if you only have an hour and you want to feel like you left the paved world behind, point your truck up the Smithsonian Butte Scenic Backway. Officially it is the Smithsonian Butte National Back Country Byway, and it runs about 9.25 miles between Rockville, up on State Route 9, and Apple Valley on State Route 59, coming out near Big Plain Junction. Short on the map. Big on the eyes.
You climb out of the Virgin River bottom, up onto a broad mesa, and suddenly the whole neighborhood is laid out for you. Look north and the sandstone pinnacles of Zion National Park stack up like a stone city, with the West Temple lording over the main canyon. Swing your gaze around and you catch Smithsonian Butte itself, the jagged Eagle Crags, and the red Vermilion Cliffs riding the edge of the Canaan Mountain Wilderness. There is no visitor center out here, no gift shop, no line of tour buses. Just juniper, sagebrush, red dirt, and one of the finest low-elevation panoramas of Zion you will find anywhere in the county.
Give yourself thirty to forty-five minutes to drive it one way, and honestly, plan on more. The mistake tourists make is treating this like a shortcut to get somewhere. It is the somewhere. Bring a sandwich, roll the windows down, and stop at every pullout that tempts you.
The road, told honestly
Let me be the neighbor who tells you the truth before the map gets you in trouble. This is a graded dirt road, unpaved for its full length, and it is managed by the Bureau of Land Management out of the St. George Field Office. In dry weather, a high-clearance two-wheel-drive vehicle handles it just fine, and plenty of standard cars creep up the gentler south end from SR-59 as far as the Wire Mesa Trailhead without trouble.
The catch is the steep pull. Where the route leaves Grafton Road and climbs to the top of the mesa, the grade gets serious. That stretch is not recommended for low-clearance cars, RVs, or anything towing a trailer. If you are in a rental sedan with four inches of ground clearance, you can enjoy the bottom and turn around; you do not need to prove anything on the climb.
And here is the rule that saves the most tow-truck money: do not drive it wet. When heavy rain or winter weather moves through, the clay surface turns to grease and cuts deep ruts, and the road becomes genuinely impassable. That red dirt does not forgive. Check conditions before you commit, top off your fuel, and know that there are no services, no gas, and spotty-to-nonexistent cell signal along the way. Carry water and let someone know your plan. Do all that, and this is a comfortable, gorgeous hour. Ignore it after a storm, and you will learn a lesson the hard way.
Geology and the landmarks that name the place
The star of the show, of course, is Smithsonian Butte, the flat-topped sandstone tower the byway is named for. It stands off to the west as you cross the mesa, a classic layer-cake of the region's Mesozoic sandstones capped by harder rock that has protected the softer stuff beneath from washing away. Everything you see up here is the story of water and time doing patient work on stone.
To the south rises Canaan Mountain, a great sandstone plateau now protected as the Canaan Mountain Wilderness. It is the same white-and-salmon Navajo Sandstone that builds Zion's biggest walls, just tilted and worn into its own private high country of slickrock and hidden canyons. Between here and there, the Eagle Crags jut up like broken teeth, and beyond them the Vermilion Cliffs glow at the day's edges. This is one of the few spots where you can take in Zion, Smithsonian Butte, and Canaan Mountain in a single slow turn of the head. Pinyon-juniper woodland and sagebrush flats carpet the mesa top, the classic middle-elevation Colorado Plateau community, and in the right light the whole scene runs from green to gold to blood-red.
How it connects the country
This little road is older news than the paved highway, and it still stitches the country together the way the old wagon routes did. You begin in Rockville by crossing the Historic Rockville Bridge, a 217-foot steel through-truss span built in 1924 over the east fork of the Virgin River and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Cross it, and you are on Bridge Road, then Grafton Road, feeding onto the byway proper. It is a fitting front door: a bridge from the touring-car era leading onto a road that predates the asphalt.
Down below the route, tucked against the river, sits Grafton ghost town, one of the most photographed abandoned settlements in the West, first settled in 1861. Grafton is a short side trip off the bottom of the road and worth every minute. Farther east, the byway threads past the Gooseberry, Grafton, and Wire Mesas, all laced with non-motorized trail networks that mountain bikers and hikers travel from all over to ride, Gooseberry Mesa chief among them. In the old days, this mesa crossing was simply how you got from the river towns over to the Apple Valley and Hurricane bench country without going the long way around. It still is.
Local tips and seasons
Spring and fall are the sweet spots. The dirt is usually firm, the temperatures are kind, and the low-angle light makes the buttes catch fire morning and evening. Summer is fine early or late in the day, but the mesa bakes at midday and afternoon monsoon storms can roll in fast, which brings us right back to the do-not-drive-it-wet rule. Watch the sky. If it looks like rain over Zion, save the drive for another day. Winter can be lovely and snow-dusted, or it can be a muddy trap, so check first.
My favorite reason to linger, though, comes after sundown. Rockville and neighboring Virgin sit in some of the finest dark skies in Utah, and up on this mesa, away from every porch light, the Milky Way pours across the whole sky. If you time your drive so you top out around dusk, find a safe wide pullout, and let your eyes adjust, you will understand why folks out here never take a clear night for granted. Bring a red flashlight, a warm layer, and patience.
One more bit of neighborly advice: take it slow, both for your oil pan and your soul. Yield to the mountain bikers, pack out everything you pack in, and remember camping is not allowed within a half-mile of the byway on federal land, nor in the towns of Rockville and Grafton, though dispersed camping opens up out on Gooseberry Mesa if that is your aim.
Nearby — make it a loop
The beauty of this drive is how easily it strings together with everything around it. Start by crossing the Historic Rockville Bridge and take a slow roll through Rockville's quiet riverside lanes, some of the prettiest old pioneer streets in the valley, before you climb. Drop down to Grafton ghost town at the foot of the route for its weathered cabins and famous church. When you are done, point yourself up the canyon to Zion National Park, whose peaks you have been admiring all afternoon, or stay out late for the dark skies over Rockville and Virgin. Bridge, backway, ghost town, national park, and a river of stars, all inside a few miles of each other.