The Rough Guide to Southwest USA

• New Mexico the fifth-largest state covers 121,355 square miles and holds a population of 2,085,109, ten percent of whom are of Native American descent. The state has 22 reservations, comprising 19 separate pueblos plus the Jicarilla and Mescalero Apache lands and part of the Navajo Nation. New Mexico became the 47th state on January 6, 1912; its capital is Santa Fe.
• Arizona, with an area of 113,635 square miles, is the sixth-largest state. Around five percent of its 6,828,065 population are of Native American descent. Its 21 Indian reservations include the homelands of the Navajo, the Hopi, the Havasupai, the Hualapai, the Oodham, and the San Carlos, Tonto and White Mountain Apache. With Phoenix as its capital, it achieved statehood in 1912, as the last of the lower 48.
• Although Utah as a whole comprises 82,144 square miles 65 percent of which is owned by the federal government and has a population of 2,995,919 (of which over 60 percent are Mormons), this guide only covers the desert areas in the south of the state, where around 175,000 people are spread across 27,000 square miles. It became the 45th state in 1896.
• The portion of southwest Colorado described in this guide represents about 5000 of the states 103,730 square miles, and holds around two percent of its total population of 5,456,574. Colorado was the 38th state to join the Union in 1876.

The Southwests most dramatic landscapes lie on the Colorado Plateau , an arid mile-high tableland, roughly the size of California, which extends across the Four Corners region of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. Atop the main body of the plateau, further layers of rock are piled level upon level, creating a Grand Staircase of successive cliffs and plateaus. During the last dozen or so million years, subterranean forces have pushed the entire complex steadily upwards. As it has risen, the earth has cracked, warped, buckled and split, and endless quantities of crumbling sandstone have been washed away by the Colorado River. The Grand Canyon is simply the most famous of hundreds of canyons , so vast that it can scarcely be grasped by the human mind. No one, however, could fail to be overwhelmed by the sheer weirdness of southern Utah the red rocks of Monument Valley , the fiery sandstone pinnacles of Bryce Canyon , the endless expanses of Canyonlands .

Reminders of the Southwests remarkable history are everywhere you look. Though century after century has brought fresh waves of intruders, none has entirely succeeded in displacing its predecessors, leaving the various groups to coexist in an intriguing blend of cultures and traditions. Ancient archeological sites abound, ranging from the free-standing pueblos of Chaco Canyon and the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde to the hollowed-out caves of Bandelier and the haunting rock art of Horseshoe Canyon. The region now holds fifty distinct Native American reservations, ranging from tiny pueblo villages in New Mexico to the huge Navajo Nation , which covers 27,000 square miles and extends across much of the Colorado Plateau. Unlike elsewhere in the US, where all too often Native Americans were forcibly displaced onto poorer lands with which they lack any spiritual connection, most Southwestern tribes continue to occupy their ancestral homelands.

The Spanish too have been in the region for almost five hundred years; exquisite eighteenth-century missions survive at San Xavier and Tumaccori in Arizona, while New Mexico holds stunning adobe churches such as San Francisco de Asis at Taos, and the humbler shrine at Chimay. Next to arrive after the Spaniards were the Mormons , who through utter determination and communal effort colonized Utah in the nineteenth century. American settlers arrived soon after, and swiftly outnumbered everyone else.