Compass Guide to Arizona

A selective guide to Arizona's scenic, cultural and historical attractions, from serene Lake Powell to the awesome Grand Canyon, and from majestic Sedona to the deserts around Tucson. Also included are eight special road trips from one to four days in length, with maps and full travel details.

I first stared at Arizona in 1973 through a window of an airplane, a commercial jet cruising somewhere in the lower stratosphere. I was flying from Des Moines to Tucson for a job interview, and what I still remember with startling clarity, as I pressed my nose to the glass and looked at the Sonoran Desert seven miles below, was a feeling of hollow, gnawing alienation.
I thought: I cannot live in this place.
The barren earth appeared the color of sun-bleached cardboard. It was raked and torn and furrowed by corrosive wind and bogus rivers that would flow, with luck, 10 days in a year. The mountains seemed equally desolate and hostile; from this altitude I had no inkling of their heroic natural architecture or the kaleidoscopic changes of the plant and animal environments on their slopes every few hundred feet. The entire Arizona landscape appeared to hold no life, no interest, no promise.
My reversal of heart did not come quickly or painlessly. For the first several years after I accepted a job in Tucson, I oscillated between a reporter's fascination with the place and a tentative resident's annoyance with it. I didn't like the bugs, the ferocious cutlery that poses as plant life in the desert, or the exhausting summer heat. I missed the sensation of four distinct seasons, and remembered in demented wistfulness the soft, cold feel of snow on my neck. I was peeved at the strange forces that seemed to be pulling on Arizona's political compass. I remember my astonishment one day in 1974 when I first saw a billboard demanding "Get US out of the UN!" on the Interstate between Tucson and the Mexican border. (It took 20 years for the desert sun to bleach it into illegibility, but then the John Birch Society put up a fresh one north of Tucson.) I detested Phoenix, and over time developed a modest reputation as the Tucson journalist who wrote more vitriolic essays about that other city than anyone i
n modern history. This mini-specialty peaked with a call from the Arizona Republic, Phoenix's morning paper, wanting to interview me about the tradition of hostility between the two cities. I still hadn't come to terms with Arizona, but on certain topics I was at least an authority.
Yet during my 14-year tenure at the Tucson Citizen, Tucson's afternoon daily, I slowly and inevitably nurtured an affection for the state.
There were some pivotal moments. One came at a time when I was beginning to indulge seriously in bicycling -- this after a couple of years of mostly staying indoors, bitching about the sunshine. Finally on Sunday mornings I began a ritual of pedaling out to Saguaro National Park, a 20-mile round trip from my house, and riding the hilly eight-mile loop road through the pristine cactus forest in the foothills of the Rincon Mountains. On a spring day I was wobbling up a long and pain-inducing hill when a Buick wearing Minnesota plates swished past. Four uncomprehending faces stared at me through sealed windows; their expressions resembled anthropologists observing some primitive aborigine praying to a pine cone. I realized at that moment that by insulating themselves from the desert -- from its physical demands and its miraculous beauty alike -- they were failing to understand even the first thing about it. As well as missing the point, probably, of life itself.
Another came in 1975, the year after a young Phoenix lawyer named Bruce Babbitt was elected state attorney general. He opened his office once a month to any Arizonan who wanted to come in and talk about their problems. I spent one of those days with him, and his connection to the land and culture of Arizona touched me. For the first time I liked an Arizona politician.
More than most other states, Arizona tests its people. Its jagged landscapes and diverse cultures dare us to comprehend them. Its climatic extremes challenge our stamina, will, and common sense. In Arizona, whether you lean to art, politics, land fraud, or journalism, you can invent yourself.
This book is partly about that act of inventing, which forms so much of Arizona's history and contemporary culture. It also is a guide to the state's attractions and eccentricities -- there are enough things to experience described in here, from hidden canyons to museums of archaeology, to keep any visitor occupied for years. It does not read very much like a conventional guidebook. It is highly opinionated and occasionally cranky, and when it turns to some of the misuse and abuse my sorry species has visited on this magnificent land it bounces peevishly between anger and sorrow. It does manage to say some fairly nice things about Phoenix. (Either I have matured or that city has.) It says even more about the joy of taking part in the extravagant life of the deserts, the canyons, the mountains, and the forests that make up this amazing land. In the end, this book is about falling in love.
Arizona is not the Arid Zone. Its geography comprises alpine forests, deep red sandstone canyons, rolling grasslands, and deserts that grow carpets of wildflowers in spring. Its largest city, Phoenix, flaunts its wealth and ambition, and irrigates the desert into submission. The second city, Tucson, struggles to come to terms with its desert environment and Hispanic heritage. The state's back roads lead to 16 national parks and monuments, 20 Indian reservations, and a host of resorts.
GRAND CANYON
Nothing else on earth prepares one for the sight: a vast chasm a mile deep and 277 miles long, a gallery of fantastic shapes sculpted by weather and water and repainted daily by the changing patterns of sun and atmospheric conditions. Waterfalls, rapids, fossils of trilobites half a billion years extinct, and ruins of Indians nearly a millennium old -- no place on earth exposes so much history and beauty to view. No place on earth, it sometimes seems, draws such crowds.