Rough Guides - The Rough Guide to Southwest USA (Travel Guide eBook)

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HAVASU FALLS, GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK

Contents

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Introduction to

Southwest USA

The Southwest is the most extraordinary and spectacular region of the United States. For splendour and sheer scale, the desert landscape consistently defies belief a glorious panoply of cliffs and canyons, buttes and mesas, carved from rocks of every imaginable colour, and enriched here by shimmering aspens and cottonwoods, there by cactuses and agaves. Lured by such iconic images as John Wayne riding through Monument Valley in The Searchers , David Bowie slithering down the otherworldly dunes of White Sands in The Man Who Fell to Earth , and Walter White skulking in the arroyos of Albuquerque in Breaking Bad , visitors flock to experience the Wild West for themselves. Whether youre driving or hiking, biking or backpacking, wilderness beyond measure awaits.

The area covered by this book roughly corresponds to the former Spanish colony of New Mexico , which has only belonged to the US since 1847, and is now divided between the modern states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Nevada. Though rainfall is scarce everywhere, its not all desert ; indeed, the popular image of the Southwest as scrubby hillsides studded with many-armed saguaro cactuses is true only of the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona. Towering snow-capped mountains rise not only in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, at the tail end of the Rockies, but also in scattered locations across Utah and Arizona, while dense pine forests cloak much of northern Arizona.

Where to go

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.

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ANTELOPE CANYON, PAGE, ARIZONA

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.

Fact file

• New Mexico the fifth-largest state covers 121,355 square miles and holds a population of 2,096,640, 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 7,378,494 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 3,282,115 (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 5,845,526. Colorado was the 38th state to join the Union in 1876.

In the early years of US rule, the Southwest was very much the Wild West . A sense of that era survives in towns like Lincoln , New Mexico, where Billy the Kid blazed his way out of jail, and Tombstone , Arizona, where the Earps and the Clantons fought it out at the OK Corral. The century since Utah, Arizona and New Mexico achieved statehood has seen the landscape transformed on an unprecedented not to say unnatural, let alone unsustainable scale. Monumental water projects, including the construction of the Hoover Dam , the damming of Utahs Glen Canyon to form Lake Powell , and the creation of a network of canals across hundreds of miles of the Arizona desert, have brought the region prosperity as the Sunbelt .

While the wilderness remains the supreme attraction for most visitors, certain Southwestern cities make worthwhile destinations. Santa Fe is the best example, with its four-hundred-year history, top-quality museums and galleries, and superb hotels and restaurants; Tucson holds an enjoyable combination of desert parks, Hispanic history, restaurants and ranch resorts; and Las Vegas , entirely and quintessentially a product of the modern era it was only founded in 1905 is far too amazing to miss. Phoenix is less obviously appealing, though it too has its fair share of top-quality parks and museums.