Dinosaurs left both skeletons and their footprints in what was once swampy mud, and is now sandstone. The tracks are hard to spot, but once you find them they provide the impetus for plenty of imagination. There are many fossil and dinosaur track sites near Moab, mostly on BLM public lands. These include the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trail and the Sauropod Dinosaur Track Site.

After the dinosaurs disappeared, this region was populated by people whose livelihood was based on the harvesting of wild resources. Approximately 2,000 years ago, agriculture began to flourish. The Ancestral Puebloan Indians in the Four Corners area (generally where the four states of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado meet) cultivated corn, beans, and squash.  Nuts, wild grasses, deer and rabbits made up the remainder of their diet.

The Ute Indians have been in southeastern Utah since the 1200s.  In the 1880s, the Ute Indians moved to reservation lands in eastern Utah and western Colorado.

Today, Moab is known as the Mountain Biking region of the world.