A Sonoran desert hillside above a shallow basin in low sun, with the whole foreground in shadow — saguaro, ocotillo and prickly pear standing on the dark slope in the near ground. Below and beyond, a long pale metal shed sits on a gravel yard with pickups, a flatbed and a trailer parked around it, power poles running out past a scatter of low buildings and green trees. Rugged ranges stand along the horizon under a clear sky. None of the desert metropolis the region is named for is in the frame.
Chris English / CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Arizona · Region

The Valley of the Sun

The desert metropolis on the canal builders' ground — Phoenix and its cities, the Superstition Mountains and the old Apache Trail, all laid over the irrigation canals the ancestral Huhugam dug and the Akimel O'odham still farm beside.

6 places to explore

Phoenix is one of the five largest cities in the country, and it is built, precisely and literally, on the ruins of an older one. A thousand years before the first Anglo settlers arrived, the ancestral Sonoran Desert people — the Huhugam, as their O'odham descendants call them, rather than the archaeologists' Hohokam — had turned the Salt River Valley into the largest irrigated farmland in ancient North America: more than five hundred miles of canals dug by hand, without draft animals, feeding tens of thousands. When they left their villages in the fifteenth century, the canals stayed in the ground. In 1867 a settler named Jack Swilling cleared out the old channels and farmed off them again, and the town that grew there was named Phoenix on purpose — a city risen from the ashes of the one before it. Modern Phoenix still runs water down the Huhugam alignments.

Their descendants never left. The Akimel O'odham — the river people — and the Pee-Posh farm the Gila River and Salt River communities on the valley's edge, beside the same water. South at Coolidge, the four-story Great House at Casa Grande still stands, the ancestral great house the government fenced off in 1892 as the country's first archaeological preserve.

The desert reasserts itself at the valley's rim. East of the sprawl the Superstition Mountains throw up a volcanic wall hung with the Lost Dutchman legend, and the Apache Trail — State Route 88, the winding dirt road hacked out in 1904 to haul in the Roosevelt Dam — climbs past Canyon Lake toward the reservoir, though the wildest stretch over Fish Creek Hill now runs rough enough that only high-clearance rigs should attempt it. Scottsdale keeps the resorts and the galleries; the Heard Museum keeps the finest record of Native art in the Southwest. The city forgets the desert. The desert is patient about it.

What to See in The Valley of the Sun

6 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

The west face of the Superstition Mountains — a long wall of columnar volcanic rock in warm brown and grey rising across the whole frame in buttresses and pinnacles, with pale talus chutes falling between them and scree gathering at their feet. A bajada of desert scrub, palo verde and cholla runs along the bottom of the frame beneath the wall, and the sky above is deep and cloudless.

Superstition Mountains

Apache Junction

The volcanic range that holds the Lost Dutchman legend — and outlasts it

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Historic Sites

The visitor center at Casa Grande Ruins National Monument — a low pale stucco building with a shallow parapet, deep-set windows in dark green frames, and a timber ramada on square posts running the length of its front, with VISITOR CENTER and NATIONAL PARK SERVICE signs and a notice case in the shade beneath it. Agaves and a barrel cactus grow in the gravel forecourt, a mesquite overhangs the frame from the upper left and throws its shadow across the paving. The Casa Grande itself — the four-storey caliche great house the Huhugam raised, and the steel canopy standing over it — is not in the frame.

Casa Grande Ruins

Coolidge

The Huhugam Great House — and the country's first archaeological reserve

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A steel through-truss bridge on the Apache Trail seen head-on from the middle of the roadway, its white-painted portal carrying a yellow clearance sign lettered 14 FT 0 IN, the trusses running away over the deck to a vanishing point. Square signs at both approaches read NO FISHING DIVING LOITERING ON BRIDGE, a green sign at the right names Boulder Creek, and black-and-yellow chevron markers stand on white concrete abutments at each side. Layered volcanic hills carrying palo verde and saguaro rise behind on both banks under a blue sky with cumulus. The narrow unpaved cliff-edge section the road is known for is not in the frame.

The Apache Trail

Apache Junction

The 1904 road built to raise Roosevelt Dam, still barely tamed

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Towns & Gateways

The courtyard of the Heard Museum in Phoenix seen through an arch — white stucco ranges with red tile roofs and arcaded openings down both sides, a colonnaded upper loggia with a balustrade at the far end, and shopfronts lettered Coffee Cantina and Books. Tan canvas umbrellas shade metal café tables and stacked chairs on the left, where two people are sitting; a long dark stone water channel and a round basin run down the centre over a bed of river cobbles; and mesquites with heavily pruned limbs stand in gravel beds set into the brick paving. The museum's galleries and its collections of Native art are not in the frame.

Heard Museum

Phoenix

The Native Southwest, told in the first person

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Phoenix at night from high ground to the south. The downtown towers stand lit in a compact cluster left of centre with an arena beside them, and the lit street grid runs out flat to the horizon in every direction. A major arterial cuts diagonally across the right of the frame as an unbroken line of white and amber, low ridges show dark against the glow along the skyline, and the sky above is empty and starless.

Phoenix

Phoenix

The fifth-largest US city, built on the canals of a thousand-year-old one

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Architecture

Taliesin West at dusk. Its low ranges are built of desert masonry — rough local stone set in concrete — under canted beams, with a long run of angled clerestory glazing lit warm from within and reflected in a rectangular pool that fills the foreground. Stone steps climb between the wings to a red door, flagstone terraces and strips of lawn edge the water, an agave stands at the right and a cypress and a bare tree at the left, and dark hills close the view under a deep blue twilight sky.

Taliesin West

Scottsdale

Frank Lloyd Wright's desert masterwork, grown from the ground it stands on

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Stories from The Valley of the Sun

History

The City on the Canals

Phoenix is the one American metropolis that means its own name literally — it rose from the ashes of an older city, re-dug the thousand-year-old canals its builders had left, and only outgrew them when twentieth-century concrete let it take more of the river than the ancestors ever could.

5 min read

The Valley of the Sun rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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