Red Rock Country & the Central Highlands
Arizona's red-rock center — Sedona's sandstone spires and the green Verde Valley below, the copper ghost town of Jerome on Cleopatra Hill, and the pine-ringed old territorial capital at Prescott.
The red rock is the draw, and it deserves to be — Sedona's sandstone towers burning orange at sundown, Oak Creek cutting a green slot down through them, the whole Verde Valley opening below. But the color sits on taken ground. This was Yavapai country, and Dilzhe'e — Tonto Apache; in 1875 the government marched the people off the Rio Verde reservation in midwinter, some hundred and eighty miles to the concentration ground at San Carlos, and opened the emptied valley to miners and ranchers two years later. The prettiest region in Arizona is also one of its plainest lessons in how the maps got drawn.
What the miners came for is written on the hillside above the valley. Jerome clings to the thirty-degree pitch of Cleopatra Hill over one of the richest copper bodies in the West — the billion-dollar camp, fifteen thousand people at its peak in the 1920s, a red-light town the newspapers called wicked. When the mines closed in 1953 the population fell below a hundred, and the buildings began sliding downhill on the fault; the jail slid two hundred feet from where it was built. Artists moved into the wreckage in the sixties, and Jerome now calls itself the largest ghost town in America without much argument.
Below it, the Verde Valley keeps the older record — the Sinagua cliff dwellings at Tuzigoot and at Montezuma Castle, the latter misnamed by settlers who took a five-story pueblo for an Aztec palace it had nothing to do with. And up in the pines to the west sits Prescott, planted in 1864 as the capital of the new Arizona Territory, its Whiskey Row saloons still facing the old courthouse square long after the honor moved on to Tucson and finally Phoenix. Come for the rocks. Stay for the wreckage and the record.
What to See in Red Rock Country & the Central Highlands
6 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Natural Areas
Historic Sites
Towns & Gateways
Stories from Red Rock Country & the Central Highlands
Red Rock Country & the Central Highlands rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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