These photos are from the Arizona portion of our 2024 "Rocks Tour" of Nevada, Utah and Arizona. The first three galleries resulted from a two-day stay in the city of Phoenix. The other four galleries are all outside Phoenix, but within the state of Arizona. Phoenix is more sprawling that even most American cities, we drove for an hour in the city before we saw a building with more than two storeys. Not a city that I would care to spend a lot of time in, but for a short visit it was engaging enough. Arizona outside Phoenix has moments of spectacular beauty, around the Grand Canyon and the hiking in Sedona. We had snow, we had 99F weather.
Photo List (Total 584 Photos)
Click bolded headers below to view, or click "just the best" for quick tours of the city, or of Arizona
Phoenix
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Downtown Phoenix (111 photos) - Yvon parked the car, put a newspaper in the windshield, and sat there with the A/C running while I walked around for 90 minutes in the 99F heat of the downtown, taking photos. Phoenix is the most sprawled city I have ever seen, and the downtown is, for the tenth largest metropolitan area in the US, very small and unimpressive. The tallest building in town, a 1970's mirrored office tower, is abandoned and there are no plans to bring it back to life. That's not to say that there's nothing pretty or interesting downtown, but Yvon probably made the right call. This gallery starts at City Hall, moves through the downtown in a general northward direction, then down to the district around the Arizona's unfortunate Capitol building. It them hops north of Interstate 10 to a financial district along Central Avenue, and ends at the pretty Encanto Park.
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South and West of Downtown (89 photos) - Includes photos of the South Mountain Park and Preserve, a few buildings at the Arizona State University, central Tempe, and the Desert Botanical Garden. The gallery ends with a few shots at the Sky Harbour International Airport.
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North and West of Downtown (68 photos) - The gallery starts with various buildings across the northern side of town, and continues into central Scottsdale. We had supper there, and then strolled the town, using a brochure outlining historical buildings as our guide. It ends with Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West complex, not a house exactly but a collection of rustic buildings that acted as a workshop for Wright and his team in the winter months. You could take photos indoors.
Arizona Outside Phoenix
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Page and Antelope Canyon (70 photos) - We stayed in Page on our first day out of Las Vegas. Page is at the far north-east of the Grand Canyon, the site of the Glen Canyon Dam. We were there primarily for a Navajo-guided tour of the Antelope Canyon. This gallery includes possibly too many photos of the canyon, but it was crazy beautiful so sue me. Also includes a few photos of us dining out, and the drive from Page down to Grand Canyon. For a long time during that drive there was a sliver of blue sky under mostly cloud, and it made for interesting views of the desert.
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Grand Canyon (67 photos) - Our day at the Grand Canyon was not what it might have been. We arrived under mostly cloudy skies, but with enough blue to let light into the canyon, and stopped at five lookouts on the east side of the canyon: Desert Watchtower, Navajo Point, Lipan Point, Moran Point, and Grandview Point. Just after Grandview Point, it started to rain and/or snow with crystals that resembled small hail, and after this it rained, more or less constantly, into the next day. Our plans to walk trails along the South Rim were dashed, but I am grateful for the views that we did get.
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Flagstaff (23 photos) - It continued to rain in the Grand Canyon and in Sedona, so we had a leisurely morning at the canyon before leaving, and then we explored the central historic district of Flagstaff, where is was cloudy but not raining until late in our visit. The city was quite a bit cuter than I had imagined it would be, and I bought a bowl.
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Sedona (156 photos) - I had hoped to have two full days of hiking in Sedona, but on account of the weather, we had one. If you look at a map online, there are so many trails that you could stay a month and not walk them all, but I felt that we got a good sense of the experience from our day. This gallery starts with the drive into Sedona, then shows our first night out in the city, then there are tons of photos of our walks on the trails. It ends with our second dinner out, a look around the downtown, and the Montezuma Castle National Monument, which we saw on the way to Phoenix.