Zuni Bluehead Sucker
A specialized bottom-feeding fish survives in fragments of the Zuni watershed, where dependable pools and connected clean stream habitat have become scarce.
Places and wildlife — page 35
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Sacramento Mountains Checkerspot
This intensely local butterfly depends on a narrow partnership among summer rain, open mountain meadow, larval host plants, and nectar across a few square miles.
Sandia Hairstreak
New Mexico’s state butterfly spends most of its life hidden on beargrass, emerging for a short spring flight as a remarkably camouflaged green hairstreak.
Soaptree Yucca
Tall flower stalks and elevated leaf crowns mark a desert yucca whose reproduction depends on specialized moths that deliberately pollinate its flowers.
Sacramento Prickly Poppy
This spectacular but threatened prickly poppy survives in a few Sacramento Mountain canyons where disturbance can both open habitat and destroy plants.
New Mexico Locust
This small native tree can turn burned mountain slopes pink with pea-like flowers, then stabilize soil through vigorous root sprouting and nitrogen-fixing partnerships.
Heard Museum
Twelve galleries connect historic and contemporary Indigenous art through named makers, living communities, materials, memory, and the difficult history of American Indian boarding schools.
Phoenix Art Museum
Latin American, Western American, Asian, European, contemporary, fashion, and photography collections reward a selective route through Arizona's largest art museum.
Musical Instrument Museum
More than 4,300 instruments become audible through location-triggered headsets, performance video, maker stories, artist galleries, conservation windows, and a room where visitors can play.
Museum of Northern Arizona
Geology, archaeology, ecology, fine art, and community knowledge meet in a museum founded to interpret the Colorado Plateau as a connected cultural and natural region.
Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West
Western art, saddles, maps, Hopi pottery, cowboy gear, and changing exhibitions examine how the American West was lived, marketed, collected, and repeatedly reinvented.
Arizona Science Center
Hands-on physics, weather, anatomy, engineering, digital modeling, and a five-story theater turn abstract systems into experiments visitors can manipulate and question.
Pima Air & Space Museum
Hundreds of aircraft fill six hangars and an immense desert field, connecting engineering, military history, commercial flight, restoration work, and the people who built and flew them.
Titan Missile Museum
The only publicly accessible Titan II launch complex retains its control room, cableways, silo, procedures, and unnerving logic of nuclear deterrence almost exactly where crews served.
Arizona State Museum
The nation’s largest public collection of Southwestern Indigenous pottery anchors exhibitions about archaeology, fiber, migration, technology, and the responsibilities of caring for cultural material.
Tucson Museum of Art
Modern and contemporary art, Latin American work, Western traditions, and pre-Columbian collections extend from a below-grade main building into historic adobe houses in Tucson’s Presidio district.
Amerind Museum
Indigenous arts, borderlands archaeology, research collections, and walking paths occupy a secluded campus among the sculpted granite boulders of southern Arizona’s Texas Canyon.
Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum
Ore, tools, photographs, labor stories, geology, and a landmark company office explain how copper built Bisbee—and how extraction shaped bodies, neighborhoods, politics, and the land.
Sharlot Hall Museum
Historic buildings, territorial politics, Indigenous and settler histories, transportation, ranching, mining, and domestic life fill an open-air campus in central Prescott.
Sigler Western Museum
Western art, ranch tools, reconstructed streets, saddles, minerals, and community history connect Wickenburg’s working landscape with the images artists made from it.
Center for Creative Photography
A major photographic archive is undertaking a multiyear collection-sustainability project: the main Center Galleries are closed while scheduled exhibitions continue in the Alice Chaiten Baker Interdisciplinary Gallery.
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
Rotating contemporary exhibitions, architecture, design, performance, and James Turrell’s skyspace occupy a compact Will Bruder building beside Scottsdale Civic Center.
Navajo Nation Museum
Diné history, treaty memory, language, weaving, jewelry, contemporary art, and community archives are interpreted by a Navajo Nation institution in the tribal capital.
Casa Grande Ruins National Monument
A four-story earthen structure, walled compound, irrigation landscape, and descendant O’odham perspectives reveal a major Ancestral Sonoran Desert community without pretending every purpose is known.
Montezuma Castle National Monument
A five-story dwelling tucked into a limestone recess becomes a concise lesson in Sinagua building, farming, exchange, preservation, and the misleading names imposed on Indigenous places.
Montezuma Well
A limestone sink, continuously flowing spring, prehistoric cliff rooms, canal traces, and species found nowhere else make water—not masonry—the central archaeological story.
Tuzigoot National Monument
A reconstructed-roof pueblo crowns a limestone ridge above the Verde Valley, making room growth, sightlines, farming, trade, and changing archaeological practice unusually legible.
Wupatki National Monument
Wupatki Pueblo, a ballcourt, blowhole, smaller communities, and Sunset Crater’s volcanic aftermath reveal a populous crossroads rather than an isolated red-stone ruin.
Walnut Canyon National Monument
Curving limestone walls hold dwellings, gardens, springs, and ecological niches that reward careful observation—but the signature trail descends 736 stairs at high elevation.
Navajo National Monument
Betatakin and Keet Seel preserve thirteenth-century architecture in immense alcoves, interpreted within Diné land and a difficult, seasonally limited hiking landscape.
Tonto National Monument
Lower and Upper cliff dwellings overlook desert, lake, and former river farmland, linking Salado architecture with thirteenth-century movement and exchange across central Arizona.
S’edav Va’aki Museum and Archaeological Park
A 1,500-year-old village mound, canal history, replica dwellings, gardens, and contemporary O’odham interpretation make Phoenix’s deep urban history visible beside the airport.
Homolovi State Park
Fourteenth-century pueblos, pottery scatters, Little Colorado River ecology, and Hopi interpretation occupy a windswept cultural landscape where leaving objects exactly in place is essential.
Crane Petroglyph Heritage Site
More than a thousand petroglyphs cover a sandstone panel beside Beaver Creek, where a rock alignment casts seasonal light across specific images—and interpretation must remain careful.
Tumacácori National Historical Park
An unfinished Franciscan church, orchard, cemetery, convento, and river corridor hold O’odham, Apache, Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. histories that resist a simple mission romance.
Mission San Xavier del Bac
Baroque sculpture, painted saints, lime-white towers, conservation work, and continuous worship stand on Tohono O’odham land at a church that is neither an abandoned ruin nor a museum set.
Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site
Rugs, jewelry, ledgers, groceries, wagons, family rooms, and a working bullpen reveal commerce and power in a Diné community without freezing trading-post life in 1900.
Fort Bowie National Historic Site
A three-mile round-trip approach passes a spring, stage station, cemetery, Apache conflict sites, and fort ruins—making movement and contested water the history, not just the destination.
Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park
Courtrooms, gallows, mining evidence, firearms, city records, and uncomfortable legal histories restore civic structure to a town often flattened into one famous shootout.
Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park
Cells, a dark cell, guard tower, photographs, and river bluff expose incarceration, labor, punishment, journalism, and myth at Arizona Territory’s first prison.
Jerome State Historic Park
A 1916 mining magnate’s mansion overlooks open pits, smelter landscapes, geology, labor, fires, and a town that slid, burned, emptied, and reinvented itself.
Taliesin West
Stone, canvas, concrete, redwood, shifting light, apprentices’ labor, and decades of revision make Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home less a finished masterpiece than a working architectural experiment.
Lowell Observatory
Historic telescopes, Pluto’s discovery, spectroscopy, planetary science, dark-sky advocacy, and live observing connect a working research legacy with the actual night overhead.
Grand Canyon National Park
Layered geology, Indigenous homelands, extreme relief, changing weather, and the Colorado River reward slow looking far beyond a single overlook.
Saguaro National Park
Giant saguaros, sky-island foothills, petroglyphs, desert washes, and surprisingly seasonal life surround Tucson in two distinct park districts.
Petrified Forest National Park
Fossil logs, badlands, petroglyphs, pueblo remains, Route 66 history, and enormous sky turn a linear drive into a deep-time transect.
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument
Organ pipe cactus, saguaros, volcanic mountains, springs, night skies, and borderland history form one of the United States’ richest desert landscapes.
Chiricahua National Monument
Rhyolite pinnacles, balanced rocks, pine-oak woodland, fire history, and Chiricahua Apache homeland rise abruptly from southeastern Arizona grasslands.