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Search - Rough Guide to Southwest USA 3 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

Rough Guide to Southwest USA 3 - Rough Guide Travel Guides
Author: ROUGH GUIDES

INTRODUCTION The Southwest is the most extraordinary and spectacular region of the United States. The splendor and scale of its scenery consistently defies belief – a glorious panoply of cliffs and canyons, buttes and mesas, carved from rocks of every imaginable color, and enriched here by groves of shimmering cottonwoods and aspens, there... more » by cactuses and agaves. In addition, the Southwest is unique in being the only part of the United States whose original inhabitants remain in residence. Though century after century has brought fresh waves of intruders, somehow none has managed to entirely displace its predecessors, leaving all to coexist in an intriguing blend of cultures and traditions. The area covered by this book roughly corresponds to the former Spanish colony of New Mexico, which has belonged to the US for a mere 150 years, and is now divided between the modern states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Nevada. Though rainfall is scarce everywhere, not all the region is desert; indeed, the popular image of the Southwest as consisting of scrubby hillsides studded with many-armed saguaro cactuses is true only of the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona. Towering snow-capped mountains rise not only in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, at the tail-end of the Rockies, but are scattered across Utah and Arizona as well, while dense pine forests cloak much of northern Arizona. The most dramatic landscapes are to be found on the Colorado Plateau, an arid mile-high tableland, roughly the size of California, that extends across the Four Corners region of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. Atop the main body of the plateau, further layers of rock are piled level upon level, creating a "Grand Staircase" of successive cliffs and plateaus. During the last dozen or so million years, the entire complex has been pushed steadily upwards by subterranean forces. As it has risen, the earth has cracked, warped, buckled and split, and endless quantities of crumbling sandstone have been washed away by the Colorado River and its tributaries. The Grand Canyon is simply the most famous of hundreds of dramatic canyons, and can seem too huge for the human mind to appreciate. No one, however, could fail to be overwhelmed by the sheer weirdness of southern Utah – the red rocks of Monument Valley, the fiery sandstone pinnacles of Bryce Canyon, the endless expanses of Canyonlands. Though, to outsiders, such harsh terrain appears inhospitable in the extreme, it has been home to Native Americans for ten thousand years. These days, much of the Colorado Plateau is taken up by the self-styled "Navajo Nation", the largest of the Southwest’s fifty Indian reservations. Until around 1300 AD, however, it was occupied by a people now remembered as the Ancestral Puebloans (the term "Anasazi" is no longer widely used; see p.520). Their magnificent adobe "cliff dwellings", squeezed like eagles’ nests into crevices in soaring canyon walls, are now major tourist attractions, preserved in places such as the gorgeous Canyon de Chelly National Monument and Mesa Verde National Park. The immediate descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans established new settlements to the south and west of the Four Corners, most notably along the Rio Grande valley of northern New Mexico. Many of their villages, as seen by the sixteenth-century Spanish explorers who first called them "pueblos", are still there today, with their architecture and ceremonial life all but unchanged. Visiting a modern Pueblo community such as Ácoma – the amazing "Sky City", perched on a glowing golden mesa – Taos, or the Hopi mesas offers a unique opportunity to experience indigenous American cultures in their most authentic surviving form. The Spaniards, the Navajo and the Apache all carved out their own domains in the Southwest from the seventeenth century onwards, and have shared the region – not always peacefully – with the Pueblo peoples and other Native American groups ever since. They were joined in the nineteenth century by the Mormons, who through utter determination and communal effort colonized modern Utah, and by the Americans, who swiftly outnumbered everyone else. In the early years of US rule, the Southwest was very much the Wild West; that era is now recalled in towns such as Lincoln, New Mexico, where Billy the Kid blazed his way out of jail, and Tombstone, Arizona, where the Earps and the Clantons fought it out at the OK Corral. The century since Utah, Arizona and New Mexico achieved statehood has been characterized by attempts to transform the landscape on an unprecedented – not to say unnatural, let alone unsustainable – scale. A series of monumental water projects – including the construction of the Hoover Dam, the damming of Utah’s Glen Canyon to form Lake Powell, and the creation of a network of canals across hundreds of miles of the Arizona desert – has brought the region prosperity as the Sunbelt. While the proximity of the wilderness remains the supreme attraction for most visitors, certain Southwestern cities make worthwhile destinations in their own right. Santa Fe is the best example, with its 400-year history, top-quality museums and galleries, and superb array of hotels and restaurants; Tucson holds an enjoyable combination of desert parks, Hispanic history, restaurants and ranch resorts; and Las Vegas, entirely and quintessentially a product of the twentieth century, is far too amazing to miss. Phoenix, on the other hand, is one to avoid; it’s possible to have a good time there, but you’d have to have a very long vacation before there’d be much point bothering. Though most of the region’s smaller towns are best treated as overnight pit-stops, some have blossomed into appealing bases for a few days’ stay. Moab is a welcome exception to the typical monotony of southern Utah farming communities; the college town of Flagstaff is a lively enclave within easy reach of the Grand Canyon; and Taos still has the feel of the artists’ colony that attracted Georgia O’Keeffe and D.H. Lawrence.

ISBN-13: 9781843530800
ISBN-10: 1843530805
Publication Date: 11/3/2003
Pages: 592
Rating:

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Publisher: Rough Guides
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 1
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Genres:

Travel >> Guidebook Series >> Rough Guide
Travel >> United States >> Regions >> South >> West South Central
Travel >> United States >> Regions >> West >> General
Travel >> United States >> Regions >> West >> Mountain

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