After Earth | Green River Overlook — the canyon that stood in for Nova Prime

The Green River Overlook is a short walk from a car park on the Island in the Sky mesa, and it delivers one of the most efficient views in the American West: the White Rim bench 400 metres below, Soda Springs Basin beyond it, and the Green River itself threading through in a colour closer to olive than green. The After Earth unit filmed here during its Utah stint in 2012, when the Moab Times-Independent reported the production wrapping in the area after working at several sites near State Route 279, on Intrepid Potash land, and at this overlook inside Canyonlands National Park.

Moab's red rock gave the film its off-world register. Where Costa Rica and the redwoods played a rewilded Earth, southern Utah played Nova Prime, the dry planet humanity settled after leaving — a place of layered sandstone benches and no visible water, which is exactly what this overlook shows you.

The geology is doing the science fiction. You are standing on Kayenta sandstone; the pale band below is Wingate; the greenish slopes are Chinle mudstone laid down in the Triassic. Three hundred million years of stacked deposition in one frame, and nothing green enough to farm.

Come at sunset, when the shadow of the mesa you are standing on sweeps east across the basin. Bring a jacket even in summer — the mesa sits above 1,800 metres and the wind at that rail does not stop. The bench you sit on is the only soft thing for twenty miles.

Location reported by the Moab Times-Independent. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.