Roger Naylor - Arizona’s Scenic Roads and Hikes

Arizona is the only state where you can hike into one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World.

Not far from the Grand Canyon, you can stand amid alpine tundratundra, for crying out loud! It carpets the summit of Humphreys Peak, the states tallest mountain soaring to an elevation of 12,633 feet. And dont think for a minute that Humphreys is lonely way up there. Arizona has twenty-six peaks that rise above 10,000 feet. Its a surprisingly vertical landscape.

Desert? Absolutely. Theres plenty of that, too. Arizona is the only state that contains the Sonoran Desert, a verdant and biologically diverse desert with thriving animal and plant communities, defined by cactus as tall as office buildings. Dropping around to visit the Sonoran and maybe borrow a cup of saguaro cactus fruit are the other three major American desertsMojave, Great Basin, and Chihuahuanmaking Arizona the only state where you can find elements of all four.

The worlds largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest stretches across Arizona. And despite Arizona being an arid state, the nations largest and second largest man-made lakesLake Mead and Lake Powellstretch along the northern border. No state has more land set aside for Native Americans. When NASA was preparing to land on the moon, Arizona is where they trained.

This is where youll find the southernmost ski resort and the southernmost mile-high city in America, two of the nations largest volcanic fields, the longest unbroken stretch of Route 66 still in existence, the best preserved meteor crater on earth, the site of the Old Wests bloodiest range war and its most notorious gunfight, the most famous slot canyon in the Southwest, and the worlds first International Dark Sky City. This is where youll find the red rocks of Sedona, the monoliths of Monument Valley, the fossilized trees of Petrified Forest, the otherworldly badlands of the Painted Desert, the legendary fortress of the Superstition Mountains, and the 200-mile long spine of the Mogollon Rim separating the sky islands of the southern deserts from the eroded heights of the Colorado Plateau in the north.

To put it mildly, when you go outside to play in Arizona, youre in the big leagues.

Hard to imagine a place more perfectly designed for road trips than Arizona. Its a big old state, the sixth largest in the union, covering nearly 114,000 square miles.