Where to visit in Arizona.

The South Rim is the side most people see, and for good reason: it is open all year, and the paved Rim Trail between Mather Point, Yavapai Point and historic Grand Canyon Village gives you the full scale of the canyon without hiking into it. Sunrise and sunset are the times to be there, when the layered rock shifts from gray to red. The rim sits around 7,000 feet, so it is far cooler than Phoenix in every season.

Sedona's red sandstone buttes - Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock, Courthouse Butte - rise straight out of the high desert, and the town is built around them. Drive the Red Rock Scenic Byway in from the south, browse the galleries at Tlaquepaque, visit the Chapel of the Holy Cross, built into the rock in 1956, and stay for sunset. It is the most popular day trip from Phoenix by a distance.

The sandstone buttes of Monument Valley are some of the most photographed landscapes in the American West, and in person they look exactly like the films. The valley is a Navajo Tribal Park, with its own entry fee and rules. The Valley Drive is a rough dirt loop past the Mittens and Merrick Butte; many visitors book a Navajo-guided tour, which also reaches areas the public road does not.

At Horseshoe Bend, a short walk from the parking area leads to an overlook where the Colorado River curls around a sandstone wall a thousand feet below. Antelope Canyon - the narrow, light-filled slot canyon you have seen in photographs - is on Navajo land and can only be visited on a guided tour, which should be booked well ahead. Lake Powell adds boat tours and beaches.

Fossilized logs more than 200 million years old lie scattered across the badlands here, their wood turned to stone in reds, purples and yellows. The park road runs north to south through the Painted Desert at one end and the densest log fields at the other, with short paved walks along the way - one of the few national parks you can see properly in an afternoon.

A former copper boomtown clinging to the side of Cleopatra Hill, which nearly emptied when the mines closed and was revived by artists. Its steep streets are lined with galleries, tasting rooms and restaurants in century-old buildings, and the views across the valley to Sedona's red rocks are worth the trip alone. Jerome State Historic Park tells the mining story from the old Douglas Mansion.

Arizona's territorial capital still feels like one: an elm-shaded courthouse square with the historic saloons of Whiskey Row along one side. At around 5,400 feet it is often 15 to 20 degrees cooler than Phoenix in summer, which is why so many Valley residents head up for the weekend. Watson Lake and the granite boulders of the Granite Dells are a few minutes north of town.

A mountain town at nearly 7,000 feet, surrounded by ponderosa pine forest and the San Francisco Peaks. The historic downtown sits on old Route 66, Lowell Observatory is where Pluto was discovered in 1930, and Flagstaff was named the world's first International Dark Sky City. In winter, Arizona Snowbowl puts skiing within reach of a Phoenix weekend.

"The Town Too Tough to Die" trades on the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and it does it well: wooden boardwalks, staged gunfights and the Bird Cage Theatre still standing on Allen Street. For the history behind the show, give the Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park an hour.

An old copper-mining town stacked up the sides of a canyon, with Victorian buildings, steep stairways and a lively arts scene. The Queen Mine Tour takes you underground into the old workings, and the vast Lavender Pit sits just outside town. Bisbee is about half an hour from Tombstone, so the two make a good two-day loop.

Older and more relaxed than Phoenix, with deep Mexican and Native American roots - and the first city in the United States named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy. Saguaro National Park protects forests of giant cactus in two districts on either side of town, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (part zoo, part botanical garden) is a superb introduction to the desert, and Mission San Xavier del Bac, south of the city, is a working mission church from the late 1700s.

Where the Colorado River widens into Lake Havasu, Arizona turns into a boating state. The town's famous landmark is the London Bridge, bought from the City of London in the 1960s, shipped over stone by stone and reopened here in 1971. Rent a boat, find a cove under the red cliffs, and the desert feels a long way off.

Most Arizona trips start here, and the Valley deserves time of its own: desert mountains to hike inside the city, the Desert Botanical Garden, the Heard Museum, Old Town Scottsdale and some of the best resorts in the country. See our guides to places to go in Phoenix and things to do in Scottsdale.