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Four Corners

The only place where four U.S. states meet

The Four Corners Monument where four states meet
Braindrain0000 / CC BY-SA 3.0 - via Wikimedia Commons

Four Corners is the only point in the United States where the boundaries of four states come together at a single spot: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah all meet here on the Colorado Plateau. A bronze and granite marker on the high desert lets visitors stand in all four states at once, a famous bit of geographic novelty in an otherwise empty stretch of red-rock country.

The quadripoint exists because these state lines were drawn as straight segments of latitude and longitude in the 19th century, and they happen to intersect at one place. The monument sits within the Navajo Nation, near the Ute Mountain Ute reservation, surrounded by mesas, canyons, and the Native nations whose lands span all four states. Surveys over the years have quibbled over whether the marker is exactly on the legal point, but by law the monument itself defines the corner.

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