From the Depths of the Grand Canyon to the Red Rock Cathedrals of Sedona, the Sonoran Desert to the Sky Islands, the Grand Canyon State Is America’s Most Visually Astonishing Destination.
There is a moment that happens to virtually every first-time visitor to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a moment so universal and so consistently reported that it has become one of the defining travel experiences of the American West. You walk toward the rim along a paved path, perhaps through a cluster of other visitors, perhaps through the piñon and juniper forest that grows right up to the edge, and then the earth simply stops and the world opens up before you in a way that the human mind is genuinely not prepared for. The canyon is so vast, so deep, so extravagantly colored, so layered in geological time, that the brain initially refuses to process it as a real thing. It looks like a painting, or a backdrop, or an elaborate hallucination. The far rim is ten miles away. The Colorado River, a mile below your feet, appears as a silver thread barely visible through the haze of distance. The walls of the canyon reveal two billion years of Earth’s history in their strata, painted in bands of red, orange, purple, cream, and brown that glow and shift as the light changes through the day.
And then the brain catches up, and you realize that it is real, that you are standing at the edge of one of the greatest natural wonders on the planet, and something shifts in you that does not entirely shift back.
That moment is Arizona’s most famous gift to its visitors. But it is far from the only one. Arizona is a state of such extraordinary geological drama, such ecological diversity, such depth of human history, and such concentrated natural beauty that the Grand Canyon, for all its magnificence, is only the beginning of what the state has to offer.
Arizona encompasses landscapes of a variety and grandeur that astonish even visitors who think they know what to expect. The Sonoran Desert, the most biologically diverse desert in the world, covers much of the southern and central part of the state in a landscape of saguaro cactus forests, ironwood trees, ocotillo, palo verde, and an explosion of wildflowers in spring that transforms the desert into something resembling a garden. The Colorado Plateau, in the north, is a high-elevation landscape of mesas, buttes, canyon systems, and volcanic peaks that represents the greatest concentration of national parks and monuments in the United States. The Sky Islands of the southeastern corner, isolated mountain ranges rising like botanical islands from the desert floor, support extraordinary biodiversity, including species found nowhere else in the United States. The White Mountains of the east offer cool forests, trout streams, and outdoor recreation in a setting quite unlike the desert landscapes that define Arizona’s popular image.
Arizona is also a state of profound and layered human history. The Ancestral Puebloans, the Hohokam, the Sinagua, and other ancient peoples left remarkable monuments across the landscape, from the cliff dwellings of Canyon de Chelly to the astronomical precision of Casa Grande. The Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the United States, covers an enormous swath of northeastern Arizona and contains some of the most sacred and spectacular landscapes on the continent. The Apache, Tohono O’odham, Hopi, Havasupai, Yavapai, and more than twenty other tribes and nations maintain living cultures across the state. The Spanish colonial legacy, the Mexican cultural heritage, and the mythology of the American West, from the gunfights of Tombstone to the cattle drives of the open range, add further layers to a human history of extraordinary depth and complexity.
And then there are the cities. Phoenix, the fifth-largest city in the United States, is a sprawling, sun-drenched metropolis with world-class museums, restaurants, resorts, and a vibrant arts scene that surprises visitors who expect nothing but suburbs and strip malls. Tucson, the second-largest city, has a distinctive and deeply layered character shaped by its Mexican heritage, its university culture, its artistic communities, and its intimate relationship with the Sonoran Desert that surrounds it on all sides. Sedona, Flagstaff, Prescott, and Bisbee are among the smaller communities that offer their own compelling combinations of natural beauty, cultural richness, and genuine character.
Arizona demands time and engagement to reveal its full depth. It is a state that conceals much of its finest beauty from the casual passer-by, that requires the willingness to leave the paved road, to hike a trail into a canyon, to drive a dirt road across a reservation, to sit in the desert at dusk and watch the light transform the rocks through a hundred shades of red and gold. But for those who bring that willingness, Arizona offers an encounter with the natural world at its most primordial and most magnificent, an encounter that changes the way you see the earth for the rest of your life.
Understanding Arizona’s Geography
Arizona sits in the American Southwest, bordered by Utah to the north, New Mexico to the east, Mexico to the south, and Nevada and California to the west. It covers approximately 113,990 square miles, making it the sixth-largest state in the country, and its geography is organized around several major physiographic regions that each have their own distinct character.
The Colorado Plateau covers the northern third of the state at elevations generally between 5,000 and 8,000 feet, a high, semi-arid landscape of extraordinary geological complexity where the forces of erosion have carved the Colorado River and its tributaries into canyon systems of incomparable grandeur. The Transition Zone, a band of mixed terrain crossing the state roughly from northwest to southeast, separates the plateau from the Basin and Range province to the south. The Basin and Range is the dominant physiographic region of central and southern Arizona, characterized by elongated mountain ranges separated by broad, flat desert valleys, creating the alternating pattern of mountain and basin that gives the region its name. The Sonoran Desert, North America’s hottest desert, covers much of the Basin and Range province in Arizona and extends south into the Mexican state of Sonora.
THE GRAND CANYON
The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, and more than a mile deep. It was carved by the Colorado River over millions of years through the rock of the Colorado Plateau, exposing geological formations that range from 270 million to nearly two billion years old. These numbers are easy to recite and impossible to truly comprehend, which is perhaps the most important thing to understand about the Grand Canyon: it operates at a scale that exceeds human cognition, and the experience of being in its presence is fundamentally one of confronting the limits of the mind’s ability to process what the eyes are seeing.
The South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park is by far the most visited section of the canyon, receiving approximately five million visitors annually and offering the widest range of facilities, trails, and viewpoints. The Rim Trail, a paved and unpaved path running along the canyon’s edge for 13 miles from Hermit’s Rest to South Kaibab Trailhead, passes a series of overlooks, each offering a different perspective on the canyon’s immensity. Mather Point, the first overlook most visitors reach from the main visitor center, provides one of the most dramatic initial views of the canyon. Yavapai Point, a short walk east, has a geology museum that helps orient visitors to the extraordinary timeline of rock visible in the canyon walls. The Desert View Watchtower, at the eastern end of the South Rim drive, a 1932 structure designed by architect Mary Colter in a style inspired by ancient Puebloan towers, provides a 360-degree panorama that encompasses the canyon, the Colorado River, the Painted Desert, and the Navajo Nation extending to the east.
Hiking into the Grand Canyon is one of the signature outdoor experiences of the American West, but it must be approached with genuine respect for the physical demands involved. The Bright Angel Trail, the most popular descent route, drops nearly 5,000 feet from the South Rim to the Colorado River in nine miles, a distance that is deceptively manageable in descent and brutally demanding on the return climb in the intense heat of the inner canyon. The National Park Service strongly discourages day hiking to the river and back, and the canyon claims the lives of several visitors each year who underestimate the combination of heat, distance, and elevation change. Hiking to the Plateau Point overlook, three miles below the rim on the Bright Angel Trail, and returning before the heat of midday is a superb day hiking option that provides genuine canyon immersion without the full commitment of a river descent. Camping at Bright Angel Campground at the bottom of the canyon, or at the Phantom Ranch lodge, requires advance reservations that are typically booked months ahead, and a night at the bottom of the canyon, with the sound of the Colorado River and the canyon walls rising thousands of feet above, is an experience of extraordinary intimacy with this geological wonder.
The North Rim, accessible only from mid-May through mid-October due to heavy winter snowfall, receives far fewer visitors than the South Rim and offers a more intimate and atmospheric experience at the cost of greater remoteness and a five-hour drive from the South Rim through Utah and Nevada. The North Rim sits approximately 1,000 feet higher than the South Rim, giving it a cooler, wetter climate that supports a forest of ponderosa pine, spruce, and fir quite unlike the piñon-juniper woodland of the south side. The Grand Lodge on the North Rim, another Mary Colter design, has a sun porch hanging directly over the canyon’s edge that is one of the most dramatic sitting rooms in the world.
Rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon is a bucket-list experience of the highest order. Commercial river trips ranging from three days to three weeks traverse the canyon’s 225 miles of whitewater, passing through rapids with names like Lava Falls, Crystal, and Granite that are among the most challenging navigable whitewater in North America. Waiting lists for both commercial and private permits are long, and planning a Grand Canyon river trip typically requires years of advance preparation, but those who make the journey consistently describe it as one of the most profound travel experiences of their lives.
Havasu Canyon, a side canyon of the Grand Canyon accessible from the Havasupai tribal lands southwest of the national park, contains a series of turquoise waterfalls, including Havasu Falls and Mooney Falls, that rank among the most beautiful natural features in Arizona. Access to the canyon requires a permit from the Havasupai Tribe, a ten-mile hike from the trailhead, and a willingness to plan well in advance as permits are extremely limited and in enormous demand.
SEDONA AND THE RED ROCK COUNTRY
If the Grand Canyon is Arizona’s most famous landscape, Sedona may be its most visually intoxicating. The red rock formations that surround the small city of Sedona in the Verde Valley, roughly 120 miles south of the Grand Canyon, create a landscape of such concentrated, saturated beauty that it consistently ranks among the most photographed places in America and attracts more than three million visitors annually to a community of fewer than 15,000 permanent residents.
The red rocks of Sedona are formed from a layer of Permian-age sandstone called the Schnebly Hill Formation, deposited approximately 300 million years ago and subsequently uplifted, eroded, and carved by the Oak Creek and its tributaries into the extraordinary assemblage of buttes, mesas, spires, and canyon walls that surround the city. The rock glows a deep, saturated red-orange in the direct sun of midday and transforms through extraordinary shades of crimson, scarlet, magenta, and deep purple in the golden and red light of sunrise and sunset. Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock, Courthouse Butte, Coffee Pot Rock, and the Boynton Canyon formation are among the most photographed and most beloved individual formations, and each time of day, each quality of light, each weather condition transforms their appearance in ways that make them seem perpetually new.
Sedona is also the center of a significant New Age spiritual culture that has grown up around the concept of energy vortexes, sites where the earth’s energy is believed by believers to be particularly concentrated and conducive to meditation, healing, and spiritual transformation. Whatever one’s views on the metaphysics of vortexes, the sites most often associated with them, Bell Rock, Cathedral Rock, Airport Mesa, and Boynton Canyon, are extraordinary natural formations that inspire genuine feelings of awe and transcendence in virtually every visitor regardless of their spiritual framework. The concentration of yoga studios, crystal shops, spiritual healers, and New Age service providers in Sedona gives the town a distinctive and occasionally surreal quality, but it also reflects a genuine culture of contemplation and intentional living that has attracted a permanent community of seekers and creatives.
The hiking around Sedona is among the finest in Arizona, with trails ranging from easy strolls through the red rock landscape to demanding technical scrambles. The Cathedral Rock Trail, a short but steep scramble to the saddle between Cathedral Rock’s twin summits, provides one of the most dramatic and most photographed viewpoints in the area. The West Fork of Oak Creek Trail, which follows a cool, cottonwood-shaded canyon through a series of stream crossings into a narrowing gorge, is one of the most beautiful and peaceful hikes in the state. The Boynton Canyon Trail accesses a magnificent deep canyon that the Yavapai people consider one of their most sacred sites. The Broken Arrow Trail, accessible only to hikers and pink Jeep tours on a permit basis, traverses some of the most dramatic red rock terrain in the area.
The Jeep tour industry in Sedona is extensive and, for visitors with limited mobility or time, provides access to backcountry red rock terrain that would otherwise require significant hiking. The pink Jeep tours are an institution and take visitors across rocky terrain, through creek crossings, and to viewpoints far from the paved road network.
Oak Creek Canyon, the dramatic gorge carved by Oak Creek through the red rock country north of Sedona toward Flagstaff, is one of the most beautiful drives in Arizona. State Route 89A descends through the canyon in a series of tight curves, passing red and cream sandstone walls reflected in the clear, cold waters of Oak Creek, with swimming holes, fishing spots, and the beloved Slide Rock State Park, where visitors slide down a natural water chute in the creek, providing recreation opportunities throughout the warmer months.
FLAGSTAFF AND THE COLORADO PLATEAU
Flagstaff, sitting at 7,000 feet elevation on the Colorado Plateau at the foot of the San Francisco Peaks, Arizona’s highest mountains, is one of the most appealing small cities in the Southwest and an excellent base for exploring the extraordinary concentration of national parks and monuments in northern Arizona. The city has a lively, university-influenced downtown, a strong commitment to dark sky preservation that has made its night skies among the finest in urban America, excellent restaurants and craft breweries, and a historic Route 66 heritage that gives its main street a nostalgic character.
The Museum of Northern Arizona, on the north edge of Flagstaff, is one of the finest regional natural history and cultural museums in the American West, with outstanding collections in the archaeology, geology, biology, and living cultures of the Colorado Plateau. The museum’s Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni galleries present the art and material culture of the plateau’s Native peoples with scholarly depth and genuine beauty, and the summer Heritage Program festivals, where tribal artists demonstrate and sell their work in the museum’s beautiful ponderosa pine grounds, are extraordinary cultural events.
The San Francisco Peaks, a dormant volcanic complex rising to 12,633 feet at Humphreys Peak, Arizona’s highest summit, dominate the landscape north and northeast of Flagstaff. The Kachina Trail on the slopes of the peaks traverses an aspen and spruce forest of extraordinary beauty, particularly in late September and early October when the aspens turn gold. The Arizona Snowbowl ski area on the peaks’ western flank provides winter recreation and in summer offers a scenic gondola ride to the treeline for panoramic views of the Painted Desert and the Grand Canyon’s South Rim visible to the north.
Wupatki National Monument, northeast of Flagstaff, preserves the remarkably well-preserved ruins of ancient Sinagua and Ancestral Puebloan pueblos built in the 12th and 13th centuries on the red Moenkopi sandstone of the Painted Desert. The Wupatki Pueblo, the largest structure in the monument, contained approximately 100 rooms and was one of the most populated communities in the entire Southwest during its occupation. The surrounding red rock and desert landscape gives the ruins a spare, monumental quality that is deeply moving.
Walnut Canyon National Monument, east of Flagstaff, preserves a remarkable series of cliff dwellings built by the Sinagua people in the shallow alcoves and overhangs of the limestone walls of Walnut Canyon. The Island Trail descends into the canyon and passes directly alongside the cliff rooms, giving visitors an unusually intimate view of the construction and daily life of these ancient communities.
Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, adjacent to Wupatki, preserves the youngest and most recently active volcano on the Colorado Plateau, a cinder cone that erupted around 1085 CE and whose eruption dramatically altered the landscape and human settlement patterns of the entire region. The cinder cone, still sharply defined in the absence of significant erosion, rises 1,000 feet above the surrounding lava field in a landscape of eerie volcanic beauty.
THE NAVAJO NATION AND MONUMENT VALLEY
The Navajo Nation, covering approximately 27,425 square miles across northeastern Arizona, southeastern Utah, and northwestern New Mexico, is the largest Native American reservation in the United States, larger than West Virginia, and home to approximately 175,000 Navajo people. It is also a landscape of such extraordinary beauty and cultural significance that it constitutes one of the most important and most complex travel destinations in the American Southwest.
Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, straddling the Arizona-Utah border in the heart of the Navajo Nation, is one of the most recognizable landscapes on earth. The great sandstone buttes and mittens rising from the valley floor, West Mitten Butte, East Mitten Butte, and Merrick Butte forming the iconic trinity that has appeared in countless Western films, photographs, and advertisements, have become synonymous with the American West itself. John Ford used Monument Valley as the setting for a series of classic Westerns beginning with Stagecoach in 1939, and the landscape has been imprinted on the global cultural imagination ever since. Visiting the actual place, seeing these formations in person rather than through a camera lens, carries an uncanny quality, like meeting a person you have known only through photographs, the reality at once more modest and more powerful than the image.
The tribal park is operated by the Navajo Nation, and visiting it requires paying an entrance fee directly to the tribe. The 17-mile Valley Drive, a dirt road that loops through the valley floor past the major formations, is passable by most vehicles in dry weather and provides the basic visitor experience. Guided tours by Navajo guides, offered by numerous operators in the valley, provide access to areas of the valley not accessible on the self-guided drive and, more importantly, provide cultural context and personal connection that transforms the experience from landscape tourism to genuine cultural exchange. The View Hotel, operated by the Navajo Nation on the rim of the valley with a direct view of the three mittens, is the primary lodging in the park and offers one of the most spectacular hotel views in the American Southwest.
Canyon de Chelly National Monument, in the Chinle area of the Navajo Nation, is one of the most significant and moving archaeological and cultural sites in Arizona. The monument encompasses a system of canyons carved by the Chinle Wash through the red sandstone of the Colorado Plateau, within whose walls Ancestral Puebloan and later Navajo people have lived for nearly 5,000 years. The White House Ruins, an Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwelling of extraordinary grace and preservation visible from the canyon rim and accessible by a trail, and the Spider Rock spire, an 800-foot sandstone needle rising from the canyon floor that holds deep significance in Navajo mythology, are the monument’s most celebrated individual features. The canyon floor, where Navajo families still maintain farms and hogans as they have for generations, is accessible only with a Navajo guide, and the experience of traversing the canyon floor in a Navajo-guided vehicle, with the red canyon walls rising hundreds of feet on either side and the ancient ruins visible in their alcoves overhead, is one of the most profound travel experiences available in the Southwest.
The Hopi Mesas, in the center of the Navajo Nation, are the home of the Hopi people, whose three mesas rising above the surrounding desert floor have been continuously inhabited for more than a thousand years, making Old Oraibi on Third Mesa one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America. The Hopi people maintain a culture of extraordinary depth and continuity, centered on a ceremonial calendar of katsina dances and religious observances that connect the community to its agricultural traditions and cosmological beliefs. Some Hopi ceremonies are open to respectful non-Hopi visitors at the discretion of individual villages, while others are closed to outsiders. Visiting the Hopi Mesas requires genuine cultural sensitivity and a willingness to follow the protocols established by the Hopi people, and those who approach the visit with that respect are rewarded with an encounter with one of the most intact indigenous cultures in the United States.
Antelope Canyon, near the town of Page on the Arizona-Utah border, is one of the most photographed slot canyons in the world, and for very good reason. The narrow passageways of Upper and Lower Antelope Canyon, carved by flash floods through the Navajo sandstone, create corridors of swirling, sinuous rock whose surfaces glow with reflected light in shades of orange, amber, and red that seem almost too beautiful to be natural. The narrow shafts of light that penetrate the upper canyon from above at midday create the ethereal light beams that appear in virtually every photograph of the place. Access to Antelope Canyon is managed exclusively by the Navajo Nation, and tours must be booked through Navajo-authorized tour operators. Lake Powell, the enormous reservoir created by Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River adjacent to Page, is a major water recreation destination with houseboating, kayaking, and powerboating in a landscape of extraordinary red rock scenery.
PHOENIX AND THE VALLEY OF THE SUN
Phoenix, the capital of Arizona and the fifth-largest city in the United States, sits in the heart of the Sonoran Desert at an elevation of roughly 1,100 feet in the Salt River Valley, a broad, flat basin surrounded by mountain ranges that glow in the evening light. It is a city that confounds expectations repeatedly, a place that reveals genuine cultural depth, outstanding museums, world-class resorts, and a culinary scene of growing national stature beneath the sprawling suburban surface that visitors first encounter.
The Heard Museum in downtown Phoenix is one of the finest museums dedicated to Native American art and culture in the world. Founded in 1929, the museum has grown into a world-class institution with outstanding collections of historic and contemporary Native American art, a particularly important collection of Hopi katsina figures, and a deeply moving permanent exhibition on the history of the Indian boarding school system that attempted to eradicate Native American languages and cultures throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The museum’s programming, which consistently centers and amplifies Native American voices in the curation and interpretation of the collections, sets a standard for cultural museum practice that few institutions match.
The Phoenix Art Museum is the largest art museum in the Southwest, with strong collections in American art, European art, Latin American art, and fashion design, and an active temporary exhibition program that brings major traveling shows to the Valley of the Sun. The Desert Botanical Garden, in Papago Park east of downtown, presents the flora of the world’s deserts, with particular depth in the plants of the Sonoran Desert, in beautifully designed landscape settings that are spectacular during the spring wildflower season and magical during the holiday season when the garden is illuminated by Las Noches de las Luminarias. Papago Park itself, a city park of red buttes and desert landscape, contains the Phoenix Zoo, Hole-in-the-Rock, a natural geological formation significant in the history of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa people, and several excellent hiking trails.
South Mountain Park and Preserve, at the southern edge of Phoenix, is the largest municipal park in the United States, covering more than 16,000 acres of Sonoran Desert mountain terrain with an extensive trail network for hiking, mountain biking, and equestrian use. The summit of Dobbins Lookout, accessible by road as well as on foot, provides the finest panoramic view of the Phoenix metropolitan area and the surrounding desert ranges.
Scottsdale, immediately east of Phoenix, is the Valley’s premier destination for luxury resort tourism, with a concentration of world-class resorts, excellent restaurants, high-end shopping, and a thriving arts community centered on the Scottsdale Arts District and the Old Town area. The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art presents ambitious programming in a striking minimalist building. The Taliesin West campus of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, in the McDowell Mountains north of Scottsdale, is one of the most important architectural sites in America, the winter home and school that Wright designed and built beginning in 1937 as a desert laboratory for his architectural philosophy. Guided tours of the campus, which Wright conceived as an organic architecture growing from and responding to the desert landscape, are deeply illuminating for anyone interested in architecture, design, or the relationship between built and natural environments.
Camelback Mountain, rising abruptly from the flat floor of the Valley between Phoenix and Scottsdale, is one of the most beloved and most demanding hiking destinations in the Phoenix area. The Echo Canyon and Cholla trails to the summit are short but extremely steep and technically challenging, and the summit views across the Valley and to the surrounding mountain ranges are magnificent. The mountain receives enormous use and reservations are required for hiking during peak periods.
The greater Phoenix metropolitan area encompasses dozens of individual communities, each with distinct personalities, including Tempe, home to Arizona State University and a lively young adult culture along Mill Avenue, Mesa, the third-largest city in Arizona with its own cultural institutions and the Mesa Arts Center, and Chandler and Gilbert, rapidly growing communities that have developed their own independent restaurant and entertainment scenes.
TUCSON AND THE SONORAN DESERT
Tucson, 120 miles southeast of Phoenix at an elevation of 2,389 feet, is a city of authentic character and considerable charm, shaped by its Mexican heritage, its university culture, its arts communities, and its deep, intimate relationship with the Sonoran Desert. Where Phoenix sometimes feels as though it has been imposed on the desert, Tucson feels as though it has grown from it, a city whose architecture, cuisine, culture, and consciousness are infused with the desert in ways that give it a distinctive regional identity unlike any other city in America.
The University of Arizona, founded in 1885, anchors the city’s intellectual and cultural life. The University of Arizona Museum of Art, the Arizona State Museum, with its outstanding collections of Southwest Native American material culture, the Flandrau Science Center and Planetarium, and the Biosphere 2, the remarkable closed ecological system 30 miles north of Tucson that was the site of the famous 1991-93 experiment in which eight people lived in a sealed artificial environment for two years, are all associated with the university and collectively constitute an outstanding cultural resource.
The Tucson Museum of Art, in the heart of the city’s historic district, is a fine regional art museum with particular strength in Western American art and pre-Columbian art. The surrounding El Presidio Historic District, centered on the site of the original Spanish colonial presidio established in 1775, contains some of the finest historic adobe architecture in Arizona, including the Steinfeld Mansion and the Edward Nye Fish House, now part of the museum complex.
The Mission San Xavier del Bac, nine miles south of Tucson on the Tohono O’odham Nation’s San Xavier District, is the finest example of Spanish colonial mission architecture in the United States and one of the most beautiful buildings in America. The white stuccoed church, built between 1783 and 1797 by Franciscan friars with the labor of the local Tohono O’odham people, rises from the Sonoran Desert in a vision of baroque exuberance, its ornate facade a masterpiece of mestizo architectural decoration combining Spanish baroque, Moorish, and indigenous artistic traditions. The church is still an active parish for the Tohono O’odham community and receives visitors who come to admire its architecture and its extraordinarily rich interior, decorated with painted statuary, frescoes, and decorative elements of great complexity and beauty.
Saguaro National Park, in two units flanking Tucson on the east and west, protects the Sonoran Desert and its most iconic resident, the giant saguaro cactus. The saguaro, which can grow to 40 feet tall, live 150 to 200 years, and weigh several tons when fully hydrated, is the defining image of the American desert, and the forests of saguaro that cover the bajadas and mountain slopes of the park create a landscape of surreal, magnificent strangeness. The western Tucson Mountain District contains the densest saguaro forests, while the eastern Rincon Mountain District, which climbs from desert floor to pine forest on the Rincon Mountain slopes, offers a remarkable ecological transect from Sonoran Desert to boreal forest in a single hiking day.
The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, west of Tucson adjacent to Saguaro National Park’s western unit, is one of the finest natural history museums in the world, presenting the full ecological community of the Sonoran Desert in an outdoor setting that functions simultaneously as a zoo, a botanical garden, a natural history museum, and an art gallery. The museum’s commitment to presenting the desert’s ecology in its full complexity, from the birds of prey aviaries and the underground tunnel exhibit presenting burrowing desert animals to the magnificent cactus and succulent gardens and the hummingbird aviary, creates an experience of the Sonoran Desert that is both educational and deeply moving. The raptor free-flight demonstrations, where trained hawks and owls perform in an outdoor amphitheater against a backdrop of real saguaro desert, are among the most extraordinary wildlife presentations available anywhere in America.
Biking the Loop, a paved multi-use trail network that now extends for more than 130 miles through Tucson’s parks and river corridors, is one of the finest urban cycling experiences in the Southwest, and Tucson’s designation as a Platinum Bicycle Friendly Community by the League of American Bicyclists reflects a genuine commitment to cycling culture that distinguishes the city.
The food scene in Tucson has been recognized internationally through UNESCO’s designation of Tucson as an American Creative City of Gastronomy in 2015, the first city in the United States to receive that designation. The recognition reflects Tucson’s extraordinary depth of food culture, rooted in its position at the intersection of Mexican, Native American, Spanish colonial, and Anglo-American culinary traditions and its access to an outstanding array of locally grown ingredients. The cuisine of Sonora, the Mexican state immediately south of Tucson, is one of the great regional cuisines of North America, centered on flour tortillas, carne asada, Sonoran hot dogs wrapped in bacon and loaded with toppings, and green corn tamales that represent a culinary tradition of great refinement and depth.
SOUTHERN ARIZONA AND THE SKY ISLANDS
The southeastern corner of Arizona is one of the most ecologically extraordinary regions in North America, a landscape where the southern Rocky Mountains, the Chihuahuan Desert, the Sonoran Desert, and the Sierra Madre of Mexico converge in a biological crossroads of exceptional diversity. The Sky Islands, isolated mountain ranges rising like biological islands from the surrounding desert and grassland seas, support an astonishing variety of plant and animal life, including species found nowhere else in the United States.
The Chiricahua National Monument, in the far southeastern corner of the state, preserves one of the strangest and most spectacular geological landscapes in Arizona. The monument’s rock formations, columns, balanced rocks, and pinnacles of volcanic rhyolite eroded into improbable shapes, were called the Land of Standing Up Rocks by the Chiricahua Apache, and the name captures their quality precisely. The Massai Point overlook, the Echo Canyon Trail, and the Natural Bridge Trail provide the best access to the monument’s most extraordinary terrain.
The Chiricahua Mountains, surrounding the monument, are one of the finest birding destinations in North America, a center of the Southeast Arizona birding culture that draws enthusiasts from around the world to seek species found nowhere else in the United States. The elegant trogon, the sulfur-bellied flycatcher, the painted redstart, and numerous species of hummingbird that breed in the cool canyon woodlands of the Sky Islands are among the sought-after species that make southeastern Arizona a birding destination of global significance. Cave Creek Canyon in the Chiricahuas is widely considered the premier birding site in the region.
Kartchner Caverns State Park, near the town of Benson, protects one of the most remarkable limestone cavern systems in the world. The caverns were discovered in 1974 by two cavers who kept their discovery secret for fourteen years while working to ensure that the cave would be preserved before being developed. The result of that extraordinary act of conservation stewardship is a cavern of remarkable biological vitality, featuring formations including a 21-foot-tall column called Kubla Khan and enormous stalactite formations, all maintained at natural humidity levels through an elaborate system of airlock entries that preserve the cave’s living ecosystem. The Big Room is home to a colony of more than 1,000 cave myotis bats from April through October, and the bat program, which allows visitors to observe the bats emerging from the cave in the evening, is one of the most popular wildlife experiences in Arizona.
Tombstone, in Cochise County in southeastern Arizona, is the most famous ghost town in the American West, the site of the O.K. Corral gunfight of October 26, 1881, in which Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday faced the Clanton and McLaury factions in what has become the most mythologized 30 seconds in the history of the American frontier. The town has embraced its reputation for gunfighting mythology and Western kitsch with unabashed enthusiasm, and the daily re-enactments of the gunfight, the restored Bird Cage Theatre, the Crystal Palace Saloon, and the Boot Hill Graveyard constitute an experience somewhere between historical site, living museum, and theatrical entertainment. The surrounding desert landscape, the authentic Victorian architecture of the town’s commercial district, and the extraordinary story of Tombstone’s brief, blazing prosperity in the 1880s, when it was the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco, give the place a historical depth beneath the showmanship.
Bisbee, perched in the Mule Mountains south of Tombstone near the Mexican border, is one of the most charming and surprising small communities in Arizona. A former copper mining town of considerable prosperity, Bisbee declined dramatically when the mines closed but has been reinvented as an arts community of genuine vitality. The town’s extraordinary topography, its buildings stacked up the steep canyon walls in layers connected by hundreds of steps, its Victorian and Craftsman architecture, its independent galleries, restaurants, and hotels, and its layered mining heritage displayed at the outstanding Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum and the Queen Mine underground tour, make it one of the most distinctive and rewarding small-town destinations in the American Southwest.
THE WHITE MOUNTAINS AND EASTERN ARIZONA
The White Mountains of eastern Arizona, rising to nearly 11,500 feet at Mount Baldy on the White Mountain Apache Tribe’s Fort Apache reservation, offer a dramatically different Arizona experience from the desert landscapes that dominate the state’s image. This is a landscape of ponderosa pine and spruce-fir forest, mountain meadows, trout streams, lakes, and cool summer temperatures that have made the region a popular retreat from the heat of the lowland desert for generations of Arizonans.
The Salt River Canyon, carved by the Salt River through the Tonto and Fort Apache Apache reservations between the Phoenix metropolitan area and the White Mountains, is one of the most spectacular and least visited canyon landscapes in Arizona. The highway drops more than 2,000 feet into the canyon in a series of dramatic switchbacks before crossing the river and climbing the far wall, and the views of the canyon walls and the turquoise river below are breathtaking.
The town of Show Low, the primary commercial hub of the White Mountains, takes its name from a card game that decided the ownership of a large ranch in the 1870s, the winning hand being a show low card. The surrounding landscape, including the Mogollon Rim, the dramatic escarpment forming the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau that drops more than 2,000 feet to the desert lowlands below, offers some of the finest forest hiking in Arizona.
Petrified Forest National Park, on the high desert plateau of northeastern Arizona, preserves one of the world’s largest and most colorful collections of petrified wood, the fossilized remains of ancient trees that fell in a Triassic-era forest more than 225 million years ago, were buried in sediment, and had their organic material gradually replaced by colorful silica over millions of years. The resulting logs, scattered across the desert in brilliant reds, yellows, purples, and whites, are among the most beautiful and unusual geological features in Arizona. The park also contains outstanding examples of Ancestral Puebloan ruins and petroglyphs and a section of the Painted Desert, the vast badlands of pastel-colored Triassic sediment extending across northeastern Arizona, that is particularly spectacular in the early morning and late afternoon light.
PRESCOTT AND THE CENTRAL HIGHLANDS
Prescott, in the Bradshaw Mountains of central Arizona at 5,400 feet elevation, is one of the most livable and most historically significant small cities in the state, the former territorial capital of Arizona and a community of Victorian elegance quite unlike the desert towns that define Arizona’s popular image. The town’s Courthouse Plaza, surrounded by Victorian commercial buildings and anchored by the 1916 Yavapai County Courthouse, is one of the finest historic town squares in the Southwest, and Whiskey Row, the saloon-lined block of Montezuma Street adjacent to the plaza, has been restored as a lively entertainment district that maintains a genuine connection to its frontier history.
The Sharlot Hall Museum, named for the remarkable territorial-era poet, author, and historian who served as the first woman appointed to official government position in any Arizona territory, is an outstanding complex of historic buildings and exhibits presenting the history of Prescott and the surrounding region with great depth and care. The Phippen Museum of Western Art, on the north edge of town, presents an outstanding collection of traditional and contemporary Western American art in a beautiful setting.
The Granite Dells, a remarkable landscape of rounded granite boulders accumulated in a jumble of extraordinary geological beauty on the north edge of Prescott, provide superb hiking, rock climbing, and paddling on Watson Lake, the reservoir that sits among the boulders in one of the most photographed lake settings in Arizona.
Jerome, perched on the steep slope of Cleopatra Hill above the Verde Valley northwest of Prescott, is Arizona’s most famous former ghost town, a copper mining community that once housed 15,000 people and is now home to approximately 450, most of them artists, gallery owners, restaurateurs, and the operators of the exceptional boutique hotels that have transformed the old mining town’s buildings into some of the most atmospheric accommodations in the state.
FOOD AND DRINK IN ARIZONA
Arizona’s culinary culture is one of the most distinctive and underappreciated in the American Southwest, rooted in the intersection of Native American, Spanish colonial, Mexican, and Anglo-American food traditions and increasingly shaped by a generation of talented chefs who have found in the state’s extraordinary agricultural resources and cultural heritage a basis for a genuinely regional cuisine.
The flour tortilla of Sonoran Mexican cooking, large, thin, and extraordinarily delicate, is one of the great breads of North America, and the Sonoran-style burrito wrapped in a large flour tortilla has achieved a purity and simplicity of expression in the taquerias of Tucson and the border region that make the national fast-food versions seem like a cruel parody. The green corn tamale, made from fresh corn ground with its milk and mixed with masa and green chiles, is a seasonal delicacy of extraordinary deliciousness that appears at festivals and in restaurants throughout southern Arizona in late summer. The Navajo taco, a creation of the Navajo Nation built on a base of fry bread topped with beans, ground beef, lettuce, tomatoes, and chile, is a beloved staple food of both the reservation and the state fair circuit.
The native foods of the Sonoran Desert, increasingly celebrated and incorporated into contemporary restaurant cooking, include the prickly pear cactus fruit, whose brilliant magenta juice flavors everything from lemonade to margaritas to sorbets; the saguaro cactus fruit, harvested by the Tohono O’odham people using traditional tools in a ceremony that marks the Tohono O’odham new year; mesquite flour, ground from the pods of the mesquite tree and used in baking and cooking by Native peoples for thousands of years; and tepary beans, small, intensely flavored beans native to the Sonoran Desert that have extraordinary drought resistance and are being revived by Native farmers and chefs as a climate-adapted food crop.
The Arizona craft beer scene has grown dramatically in the past decade and now encompasses more than 100 breweries throughout the state, with particular concentration in Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, and Sedona. Four Peaks Brewing in Tempe, SanTan Brewing in Chandler, Huss Brewing in Phoenix, and Flagstaff Brewing Company are among the most respected producers. The wine industry, centered in the Willcox and Sonoita-Elgin appellations in southeastern Arizona, has developed a small but growing number of producers working with varieties suited to the state’s warm, high-elevation vineyard conditions.
OUTDOOR RECREATION
Arizona’s outdoor recreation opportunities are as varied as its landscapes, encompassing world-class hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking, whitewater rafting, birding, stargazing, and more in settings that range from the Sonoran Desert floor to the alpine forests of the Sky Islands and White Mountains.
The state trail network includes the Arizona Trail, a 800-mile long-distance hiking and mountain biking route running the full length of the state from the Mexican border to Utah, traversing desert, canyon, mountain, and plateau country in a journey that encapsulates the full geographic diversity of Arizona. The trail passes through or near the Huachuca Mountains, Tucson, the Rincon Mountains, the Santa Catalina Mountains, Oracle, Superior, the Mazatzal Wilderness, Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, and the Arizona Strip before reaching Utah, creating a continuous 800-mile transect through some of the finest landscapes in the American West.
Stargazing in Arizona, particularly in the dark-sky areas of the state away from metropolitan light pollution, is among the finest available anywhere in the United States. Arizona has more certified International Dark Sky Places than any other state, and the combination of high elevation, dry air, and distance from large urban areas creates conditions for astronomical observation that professional astronomers prize highly. Kitt Peak National Observatory, west of Tucson, is one of the premier astronomical research facilities in the world and offers public programs and nighttime observation sessions of exceptional quality.
PRACTICAL TRAVEL INFORMATION
Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport is the primary air gateway to Arizona, one of the busiest airports in the country and a hub for American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, with extensive domestic and international connections. Tucson International Airport serves the southern part of the state with a more limited route network. Flagstaff Pulliam Airport connects the northern part of the state to Phoenix with commuter service.
Driving is essential for exploring Arizona beyond the metropolitan areas, and the state’s highway and byway network encompasses some of the finest road trips in America. US-89 and US-89A through the Navajo Nation and up through the canyon country of northern Arizona to Flagstaff, US-180 from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon’s South Rim through the San Francisco Peaks, State Route 77 through Globe and the Salt River Canyon to the White Mountains, and the network of roads through southeastern Arizona’s Sky Islands are among the most scenically extraordinary drives in the country.
Arizona’s climate is dominated by heat in the lowland desert areas, where summer temperatures regularly exceed 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix and Tucson from June through September. Winter is the primary tourist season in the desert lowlands, when daytime temperatures are mild and pleasant and the desert landscape is at its most accessible. Spring, particularly late February through April, is the most spectacular season for desert wildflowers and is widely considered the finest time to visit the Sonoran Desert. The higher elevation areas of northern Arizona, including Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, experience genuine four-season weather with cold winters and significant snowfall, cool and magnificent summers, and spectacular autumns when the aspens turn gold in the San Francisco Peaks and the canyon country glows in the low-angle autumn light.
Conclusion
Arizona is a state that operates at geological time scales, and visiting it properly requires accepting that you are an extremely small and temporary presence in a landscape that was ancient before the first human beings arrived and will endure long after the last ones have departed. The Grand Canyon does not care about your schedule. The saguaro forest does not acknowledge your presence. The red rocks of Sedona are indifferent to your camera. And yet the experience of being in their presence, of standing at the edge of that impossible abyss or walking among those enormous cactus columns at dawn or watching the light turn Cathedral Rock to fire at sunset, is one of the most powerful and most humbling available to a human being.
It is a state that demands physical engagement, that asks you to leave the air-conditioned vehicle and the comfortable resort and put your feet on the actual earth, to feel the heat of the desert rock under your hands, to breathe the air that smells of creosote after rain, to listen to the absolute silence of a desert night. It demands cultural respect and humility, asking you to recognize that the landscapes you are visiting as a tourist have been home to human communities for thousands of years, that the ancient ruins are not merely picturesque ruins but the homes and ceremonial centers of peoples whose descendants are still here, still maintaining living cultures of extraordinary depth and continuity.
And it rewards both the physical engagement and the cultural humility with experiences that cannot be replicated anywhere else on earth. The Grand Canyon at sunrise, the color coming up slowly through the canyon walls from blue to gray to pink to gold to blazing orange. The silence of the Hoh Rain Forest transposed to the Sonoran Desert in the stillness before dawn when the coyotes stop calling and the quail have not yet begun. The night sky over Monument Valley with no light pollution for a hundred miles in every direction and the Milky Way overhead in a density of stars that makes you feel simultaneously infinitely small and part of something infinitely large.
Arizona is not a destination. It is an education. It teaches you about time, about scale, about the relationship between human beings and the natural world, about the cultures that have found meaning and sustenance in landscapes that appear inhospitable to the uninitiated. It is one of the most important classrooms available to an American traveler, and its lessons, learned on the rim of the canyon or in the silence of the desert or in the presence of a thousand-year-old ruin, tend to stay with you for the rest of your life.
Go to Arizona. Go with time to spare and a willingness to be surprised. Go with respect for the land and for the people who call it home. Go with the understanding that you will not see it all and that what you do see will change something in you that does not entirely change back.
That is what Arizona does. It changes you. And that is precisely why it is worth the journey.
Arizona — The Grand Canyon State. Grand in everything: its canyons, its deserts, its mountains, its skies, its history, and its hold on the imagination of everyone who has ever stood at the edge of its earth and looked out at the ancient, magnificent, indifferent, astonishing world below.