Things to Do in United States in March

This full-day expedition departs the neon-bright sprawl of Las Vegas and drives southeast through the Mojave, where the creosote flats give way abruptly to the immense silence of the Grand Canyon's West Rim. The route passes Hoover Dam, its Art Deco intake towers rising from water so turquoise it looks artificially dyed, and the sheer concrete face of the dam hums with a low vibration you feel in your chest as you stand on the walkway. At the canyon itself, the optional Skywalk, a horseshoe of glass cantilevered over 4,000 feet of empty air, delivers a visceral, knee-weakening perspective. You look straight down through the transparent floor to the rust-colored Colorado River threading between ancient schist walls.

The ferry to Alcatraz crosses San Francisco Bay in about fifteen minutes, long enough for the salt wind to sting your face and for the island's stark concrete cellhouse to grow from a grey smudge to a looming, paint-peeled fortress. The audio tour inside the cellblock is narrated partly by former inmates and guards, their gravelly voices echoing off the steel tiers while you stand in a five-by-nine-foot cell and feel the cold radiating from the bare walls. The 48-hour hop-on hop-off bus component covers the city's famous hills and neighborhoods, from the sourdough-scented bakeries of Fisherman's Wharf to the eucalyptus groves of the Presidio, where the sharp herbal fragrance cuts through the fog.

Inside a small white chapel on the Las Vegas Strip, an Elvis impersonator in a rhinestone-studded jumpsuit croons "Can't Help Falling in Love" while the scent of fresh-cut flowers and the faint sweetness of stage fog fill the room. The ceremony, whether a legal wedding or a vow renewal, lasts about thirty minutes. But the theatricality is dialed to maximum. Colored spotlights sweep the aisle. The officiant delivers lines in a deep Memphis drawl. The chapel's interior gleams with polished wood pews and satin draping. It is absurd. It is earnest. The guests who witness it tend to laugh and cry in equal measure, which is the entire point of Las Vegas as a cultural phenomenon.

Yellowstone in late winter and early spring is a landscape operating at extremes. Snow still blankets the meadows and lodgepole pine forests in white so bright it aches behind your eyes, while the park's ten thousand thermal features, geysers, fumaroles, mud pots, hot springs, punch through the cold with clouds of sulfur-tinged steam that rise hundreds of feet into the frigid air. A guided day tour routes through the park's marquee sites. Old Faithful's predictable eruptions. The prismatic rings of Grand Prismatic Spring where scalding water shades from deep cobalt at the center through bands of emerald, gold, and rust-orange at the bacterial margins. The travertine terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs, where mineral-laden water has built staircase formations that click underfoot like porcelain. The smell of hydrogen sulfide hangs in pockets along the boardwalks, sharp and unmistakable, and the sound of geysers venting, a low, throaty hiss that builds to a roar, carries across the still winter landscape with startling clarity.

This tour pairs two of Utah's most geologically distinct parks in a single day, and the contrast between them is the whole appeal. Bryce Canyon's amphitheaters hold thousands of hoodoos, tall, narrow rock spires eroded into shapes that look like hooded figures, chess pieces, and cathedral organs, and from the rim the view drops into a forest of orange and cream-colored pinnacles so dense it resembles an alien city. The air at Bryce's 8,000-foot elevation is thin and cold in March, carrying the clean resinous scent of ponderosa pine. Zion, by contrast, sits lower in a deep sandstone canyon where the Virgin River has carved walls that rise 2,000 feet on either side, their surface streaked with dark desert varnish that weeps down the red and tan cliff faces like spilled ink. The sound of the river, steady, muscular, amplified by the narrow canyon, follows you everywhere.

This variant of the Las Vegas-to-Grand Canyon day trip includes two full meals, a detail that matters more than it might sound, because the West Rim sits on the Hualapai Reservation where food options are limited and overpriced, and arriving fed lets you spend your canyon time at the rim rather than in a queue. The route follows the same dramatic trajectory from the flat, shimmering Mojave basin through the Joshua tree belt and into the Grand Canyon's western approach, where the earth simply drops away without warning. One moment you are walking across scrubby desert, and the next you are standing at the edge of a chasm so deep the river at the bottom looks like a copper thread. Hoover Dam's stop lets you feel the thrumming turbines through the observation deck floor and smell the dry concrete and river mist mixing in the intake tower ventilation. The optional Skywalk adds the vertiginous glass-floor experience over the void.