The Grand Canyon & the San Francisco Peaks
Arizona's high volcanic north — the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the ponderosa city of Flagstaff, the San Francisco Peaks sacred to the Hopi and Diné, and the cinder cones and lava flows that built this country.
Most people come for the hole in the ground, and it earns every superlative — a mile deep, ten miles across, the Colorado still cutting at the bottom of it, the whole history of the planet stacked and legible in its walls. But the Grand Canyon's South Rim is only the front door to a stranger country. This is Arizona's high, cold, volcanic north, built by fire rather than water: some six hundred vents of the San Francisco Volcanic Field, and at its center the San Francisco Peaks, the eroded stump of a stratovolcano that once stood far higher. Humphreys, at 12,633 feet, is the highest ground in the state.
The Peaks are not scenery. They are sacred to thirteen nations, and to lead with the mountain rather than the ski lift is the honest way to see them. The Diné know the western sacred mountain as Dook'o'oosłííd, the summit that never melts, a boundary marker of the Navajo homeland. To the Hopi it is Nuvatukya'ovi, the place of snow on the very top, where the katsina spirits live half the year and carry the rain back to the mesas. That the Arizona Snowbowl makes artificial snow on those slopes from reclaimed wastewater, over the sustained objection of the tribes who hold the mountain holy, is a live argument, not a settled one.
Around the Peaks the ground keeps its receipts. Sunset Crater erupted less than a thousand years ago, within memory of the people farming beneath it; their pueblos still stand at Wupatki and their cliff houses at Walnut Canyon. Flagstaff sits in the largest ponderosa forest on the continent, guards its darkness fiercely enough to have become the world's first Dark-Sky City, and was where Pluto was found in 1930. West of it, Williams was the last town on Route 66 bypassed by the interstate, and the Grand Canyon Railway has climbed from there to the rim since 1901. The Canyon is the reason you come. The rest is the reason you stay.
What to See in The Grand Canyon & the San Francisco Peaks
7 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Geology & Rock Formations
Natural Areas
Historic Sites
Towns & Gateways
Scenic Drives through The Grand Canyon & the San Francisco Peaks
Stories from The Grand Canyon & the San Francisco Peaks
The Grand Canyon & the San Francisco Peaks rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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