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Friends of the Verde RiverFor more than 20 years, bird lovers in Arizona and beyond have celebrated the onset of the summer breeding season at the Verde Valley Birding and Nature Festival. As in the past, this year’s event takes place the last weekend in April and is centered at Dead Horse Ranch State Park. -
City of FlagstaffThe most productive aquifer in northern Arizona is named after its main water-bearing rock unit — the Coconino Sandstone. The Coconino Aquifer underlies 27,000 square miles west of Flagstaff and into New Mexico and southern Utah.
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President Calvin Coolidge declared Wupatki as a national monument in northern Arizona 100 years ago. It gave visitors a chance to see close up the rock-walled structures built by Ancestral Puebloans almost a thousand years before. -
You’ve likely seen pictures of the Very Large Array Radio Telescope near Socorro in New Mexico, which has been featured in movies like Contact and Independence Day. But you may not know northern Arizona has its own Very Large Array on Anderson Mesa. -
Chaco Canyon, in northwestern New Mexico, is the setting for one of the largest ancestral Pueblo communities in the southwest. -
Forest managers are researching fungi as a surprising new tool to aid restoration projects that ease the risk of wildfire. -
Throughout the southwest are thousands of villages that were once the homes and gathering places for ancestral Pueblo peoples. These structures represent the last thousand years of Indigenous skill and ingenuity. -
Montezuma Castle is a cliff dwelling overlooking Wet Beaver Creek in the Verde Valley. Undoubtedly, the water, plants, animals and other natural resources drew the Sinagua people here a thousand years ago — and attracted attention ever since. -
The San Francisco Peaks ragwort stands sentry over northern Arizona from its home on the San Francisco peaks. It grows close to the earth in unassuming, flat-topped clusters of blue-green leaves. -
Nowhere in the world can you visit an urban ice age exhibit taking place in real time, except the La Brea Tar pits of Los Angeles. It's known for the massive ice age megafauna animals trapped within the unsuspecting tar. -
The headwaters of the San Juan River originate in the snow-capped peaks of the southern Rocky Mountains. Along its journey, the river is joined by numerous tributaries as it flows through the states of Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. -
Ancestors of present-day horses originated in North America and spread around the world from there. But, according to the archaeological record, they were absent from the continent since the end of the Pleistocene some 10,000 years ago until Europeans re-introduced them.
