Petroglyph National Monument
Ancestral Pueblo and later historic carvings cover basalt escarpments along the city’s West Mesa, where rock imagery remains culturally active rather than merely decorative.
United States: places and wildlife — page 34
Browse the published Explore collection for United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
El Morro National Monument
A reliable pool drew Ancestral Pueblo residents, Spanish expeditions, and American travelers to one sandstone promontory, leaving architecture and inscriptions layered in place.
Puye Cliff Dwellings
Multi-story cliff and mesa-top dwellings are visited only on guided tours led through Santa Clara Pueblo’s own ancestral landscape.
Jemez Historic Site
Stone pueblo rooms and San José de los Jémez mission stand together in a narrow red-rock valley interpreted with Jemez Pueblo descendants.
Three Rivers Petroglyph Site
More than twenty thousand petroglyphs cover a mile-long basalt ridge above the Tularosa Basin, creating an exceptionally dense but exposed archaeological walk.
Manhattan Project National Historical Park — Los Alamos
Downtown exhibits, preserved community sites, and rare controlled laboratory tours examine how Project Y built atomic weapons—and how its consequences continue.
Fort Union National Monument
A vast nineteenth-century military depot, hospital, arsenal, and surviving Santa Fe Trail ruts expose how the U.S. projected power across the Southwest.
Lincoln Historic Site
Courthouse, store, tower, and adobe homes turn the Lincoln County War into a study of commerce, ethnicity, law, violence, and community.
Bosque Redondo Memorial at Fort Sumner
A solemn memorial and museum confront the U.S. military imprisonment of Diné and Mescalero Apache people at Bosque Redondo from 1863 to 1868.
Carlsbad Caverns National Park
A steep natural entrance, immense decorated chambers, cave-adapted life, and summer bat flights make the cavern both a geological system and a living habitat.
Valles Caldera National Preserve
Broad grass valleys, resurgent lava domes, trout streams, obsidian, and one of New Mexico’s largest elk herds occupy a 13-mile-wide volcanic depression.
Capulin Volcano National Monument
A remarkably symmetrical cinder cone rises above the Raton-Clayton volcanic field, with rim and crater trails revealing eruption structure at human scale.
Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge
Managed ponds, farm fields, cottonwood bosque, and Chihuahuan Desert uplands concentrate cranes, geese, raptors, and waterfowl along a major flyway.
Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness
Gray washes, orange clinker, petrified wood, balanced hoodoos, and dinosaur-age strata create a remote wilderness with almost no built guidance.
Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument
A narrow canyon and volcanic cone formations rise from land co-managed with Cochiti Pueblo, where reservation-only access protects both geology and community.
Organ Mountains–Desert Peaks National Monument
Four mountain ranges protect Chihuahuan Desert ecology, Indigenous sites, Butterfield routes, ranching history, and a skyline that defines Las Cruces.
El Malpais National Monument
Ropey pāhoehoe, jagged ʻaʻā, lava tubes, cinder cones, arches, and ancient routes create one of New Mexico’s starkest volcanic landscapes.
Rio Grande del Norte National Monument
Deep river canyons, volcanic cones, migratory corridors, rock imagery, and high desert communities meet between Taos and the Colorado line.
City of Rocks State Park
Erosion divided welded volcanic ash into lanes, courtyards, and towers, creating a compact stone ‘city’ surrounded by Chihuahuan Desert grassland.
Bottomless Lakes State Park
Blue-green cenotes formed where soluble rock collapsed, creating New Mexico’s first state park and an unexpected chain of aquatic habitats.
La Luz Trail
Eight miles of switchbacks, limestone cliffs, forest transitions, and sweeping Albuquerque views gain nearly four thousand feet to the Sandia crest.
Wheeler Peak Trail
A high-altitude climb through spruce-fir forest and treeline reaches 13,161-foot Wheeler Peak, with bighorn habitat and severe exposure to weather.
Atalaya Mountain Trail
A readily reached but strenuous ascent from St. John’s College climbs piñon-juniper and ponderosa slopes to broad views over Santa Fe and the Jemez Mountains.
Dripping Springs Trail
A moderate canyon trail reaches the remains of a mountain resort and tuberculosis sanatorium below one of New Mexico’s sharpest skylines.
ABQ BioPark Botanic Garden
Southwestern plants, Mediterranean and tropical conservatories, heritage crops, pollinator habitat, and playful children’s spaces make this a garden of climatic contrasts.
Santa Fe Botanical Garden
Orchards, xeric borders, native plants, art, and arroyo ecology demonstrate what cultivated beauty means under Santa Fe’s thin air and limited water.
ABQ BioPark Zoo
Southwestern wildlife, global species, veterinary work, and changing habitats make a compact zoo that is strongest when read through animal behavior and conservation.
Living Desert Zoo and Gardens State Park
A walking route through native habitats brings bison, pronghorn, reptiles, birds, succulents, and desert ecology together above the Pecos Valley.
Jemez Mountains Salamander
This entirely terrestrial, lungless salamander breathes through moist skin and survives in cool underground refuges within one New Mexico volcanic mountain range.
New Mexico Meadow Jumping Mouse
Built for leaps but dependent on saturated streamside vegetation, this rare subspecies must feed and reproduce quickly before an unusually long hibernation.
New Mexico Whiptail
New Mexico’s state reptile is an all-female species that reproduces without males, preserving a successful hybrid genome through cloned daughters.
New Mexico Ridge-nosed Rattlesnake
This small, beautifully marked rattlesnake survives in isolated pine-oak sky islands at New Mexico’s southwestern edge and across the nearby Mexican border.
Rio Grande Silvery Minnow
Once spread through much of the Rio Grande, this modest minnow now persists naturally in a New Mexico reach where river flow and floodplain connection decide its future.
Pecos Pupfish
This small native fish tolerates heat and salinity that exclude many competitors, yet introduced relatives can erase it genetically through hybridization.
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.
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.