Explore Arizona

Arizona holds three of the landscapes this catalogue is built on and they are nothing like each other: the Grand Canyon in the north at 7,000 feet, the red rock country around Sedona in the middle at about 4,500, and the Sonoran desert around Phoenix and Tucson at barely 1,000.

That spread inverts the season. The low desert is at its best from November to April and genuinely dangerous in July; the Colorado Plateau in the north is the opposite way round. Between them, July to September is the monsoon — afternoon thunderstorms that build fast and put water into slot canyons that were dry that morning.

Two of the state’s best-known places are not national parks and do not work like them. Antelope Canyon and Monument Valley are on Navajo Nation land, with their own entry fees and their own rules, and the canyons can only be entered with an authorised Navajo guide.

One practical oddity: Arizona does not observe daylight saving time, but the Navajo Nation within it does. For half the year the clock changes as you cross into it.