Moab Museum Gala 2026 Kicks Off a Busy Late-March Events Season

The Moab Museum traded its exhibit halls for The Hoodoo Moab on Thursday, March 26, when its 2026 Annual Gala drew guests into a Prohibition-era boomtown setting complete with a live auction, awards ceremony, and vintage-style photo booth. The event ran from 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., channeling what the museum called the spirit of Robbers Roost: "sneaky, glamorous, and just a little gritty."

The live auction featured regional experiences, original artwork, and one-of-a-kind adventures. Awards went to community partners, volunteers, and Museum collaborators who supported the year's programming. Tickets were priced at $115 for general admission and $90 for members; seating typically sells out, and the museum had encouraged purchases well in advance of the event.

As the museum's signature fundraiser, the Gala backs exhibitions, educational programming, and efforts to preserve southeast Utah's natural and cultural history, from Moab's uranium boomtown chapter to the ongoing stories unfolding across canyon country today.

The Gala arrived just one day before the 2026 Easter Jeep Safari, which launched Saturday, March 28, and runs through April 5. The nine-day event, hosted by the Red Rock 4-Wheelers, fills Moab with off-road enthusiasts on mostly day-long trail runs departing from town, adding thousands of vehicles to the corridor between Arches and Canyonlands.

That one-two sequence, a sold-out Thursday fundraiser followed immediately by one of the region's largest 4x4 gatherings, captures how compressed Moab's late-March calendar has become. Anyone still looking for lodging this week is working against a tight market. Parking at popular Arches trailheads typically reaches capacity by mid-morning on Safari weekends, making a pre-8 a.m. arrival one of the few reliable workarounds.

The Moab Area Chamber and Discover Moab have both flagged this stretch of the calendar as a high-demand window and recommend locking in guided trip bookings before arrival. For visitors planning day hikes or permitted outings near town, building extra buffer time into the drive to trailheads is a practical hedge against the traffic that clusters around event activity on Main Street and the highway north of town.