Washington State is more than Seattle and Mount Rainier. Beyond the Space Needle and the ferry terminals, beyond the coffee shops and the tech campuses, Washington holds a remarkable collection of small towns that most visitors never find, and most Seattle residents have never visited despite living within two or three hours of them.
This guide of best small towns...
Looking for the Best Things to Do in Tubac AZ? Tubac has a legitimate claim to being the most historically significant small community in Arizona. Established in 1752 as a Spanish colonial presidio, a military garrison protecting the missions and settlers of the Pimería Alta, Tubac predates Tucson by more than 20 years and stands as Arizona's first European...
Patagonia sits at 4,000 feet in the Santa Cruz Valley of southern Arizona, a town of 900 people surrounded by some of the most ecologically and scenically significant landscape in the American Southwest. It has a Nature Conservancy preserve that serious birders from around the world visit specifically.
It has wine tasting rooms within walking distance of its single...
Two former copper mining towns. Two dramatic geographic settings. Two arts communities that grew out of economic collapse and cheap studio space. Two collections of galleries, restaurants, and historic hotels that draw visitors from across the Southwest. And yet Bisbee and Jerome are genuinely different places that deliver genuinely different experiences.
If you have time for only one, this comparison...
At 4:00 AM on July 12, 1917, approximately 2,000 armed men fanned out through the residential neighborhoods of Bisbee, Arizona, and the nearby suburb of Warren. They carried rifles and shotguns. They wore white armbands for identification. They had deputization papers signed by Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler.
And over the next several hours, they systematically rounded up 1,286...
Arizona has more ghost towns per square mile than almost any state in the American West. The combination of mineral wealth, remote terrain, boom-bust mining economics, and a late-19th-century settlement rush created hundreds of communities that flourished briefly and then emptied with almost equal speed when the ore ran out, the railroad bypassed them, or the water supply failed.
What...
Tombstone, Arizona has a marketing problem that is also, in a backwards way, its greatest asset. Every visitor arrives knowing at least one thing: the gunfight at the OK Corral, October 26, 1881, 30 seconds of violence that produced three dead cowboys and the most documented gunfight in American frontier history.
That singular event, endlessly retold in film, television, and...
Jerome, Arizona is having an identity crisis, in the best possible way. It is simultaneously a ghost town (officially designated one of the largest in America), a thriving arts destination, a wine trail hub, a haunted history landmark, and a jaw-dropping piece of landscape architecture where 19th-century buildings cling to a steep mountainside above one of the most beautiful...
America has a small-town problem. Not the problem people usually talk about, economic decline, population loss, lack of opportunity. The other problem: the best small towns in the country are so systematically overlooked by mainstream travel coverage that millions of people drive past them every year on the way to the same crowded destinations.
This guide exists to fix that.
What...
Arizona is not just Grand Canyon postcards and Phoenix sprawl. Tucked between its red-rock mesas, desert grasslands, and mountain sky islands lies a parallel Arizona that most visitors never find, a patchwork of Victorian mining towns, Route 66 relics, artist colonies, wine villages, and ghost-town streets where burros still roam free.
These are the small towns that make Arizona one...