Season

Winter

16 destinations along 14 roads

Winter splits the West in two. In the low Sonoran country — Phoenix, Tucson, the old copper and silver towns of the south — it is simply the good season, the months when the sun turns kind and the summer that would flatten you has gone quiet. Drive north and winter becomes the reason to come rather than the thing to flee: a sleigh ride out among feeding elk, a family ski hill running since 1939, red rock dusted white. Same season, opposite counsel — go south to escape it, go north to find it.

I-10 / I-171

Phoenix

Phoenix

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

I-10 / I-191

Tucson

Tucson

The Old Pueblo — four thousand years of farming under the sky islands

UT-181

Snow Canyon State Park

Ivins

Red and white sandstone cliffs with ancient lava flows

I-191

Mission San Xavier del Bac

Tucson

The White Dove of the Desert — the finest Spanish Baroque church in the country

Oatman Highway (Historic Route 66)1

Oatman

Oatman

A gold camp in the Black Mountains that outlived its mines, now run by wild burros — reached by the wildest switchbacks left on Route 66, and named for a history worth telling straight.

SR-802

Bisbee

Bisbee

Queen of the Copper Camps — and the deportation it tried to forget

Tombstone

Tombstone

The silver strike named for a death that never came

SR-87 / SR-2871

Casa Grande Ruins

Coolidge

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

SR-882

Superstition Mountains

Apache Junction

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

The Apache Trail

Apache Junction

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

US-951

Beatty

Beatty

The town that water built and water kept — the Bullfrog boom's lone survivor, now Nevada's gateway to Death Valley, with wild burros wandering Main Street.

Loop 1011

Taliesin West

Scottsdale

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

UT-1011

Hardware Ranch Wildlife Management Area

Hyrum

A winter elk feeding ground where you can take a sleigh ride among hundreds of elk

UT-2431

Beaver Mountain Ski Area

Garden City

A family-owned ski hill that has been run by the same family since 1939

NV-374 / US-951

Rhyolite

Beatty

The most complete ghost town in Nevada — a stone city with an opera house and a marble-stepped bank that rose and died inside a decade, now the most photographed ruin in the West.

Central Avenue1

Heard Museum

Phoenix

The Native Southwest, told in the first person

Related tags

PhotographyIconicOff the Beaten PathNative American HeritageKid-FriendlyPaid EntryFreeMining Boom