Where
Arizona is a staircase, and a day's walk can be on any step of it.
The low step
Saguaro country. The ground is gravel and low thorn, and the saguaro stand about in it like people who have stopped to think. In March the brittlebush turns the slopes yellow for a few weeks and then gives it up.
It is hot here for most of the year, which is why the walks are held in the cooler half of it.
The middle step
Sandstone that was laid down flat and then lifted, and water has been cutting into it ever since. The rock is red because of the iron in it, and at either end of the day it goes redder still.
Juniper and pinyon grow in the thin soil between the cliffs. The walking is on slickrock and loose red dirt, and the country changes character every half mile.
The high step
Cooler up here, and green. Ponderosa pine, and granite worn into boulders the size of houses. Creeks run in spring. Snow falls most winters, a mile above sea level and an hour north of the saguaro.
The junipers up here are old. Their bark breaks into small squares as they age, and the biggest of them were standing a long time before any of this was a national forest.
Between the saguaro and the pines there is the better part of five thousand feet. That is the whole reason a day can be walked here in almost any month. In July it is a hundred and ten degrees down around Phoenix and the high eighties up at Prescott, and in January it is the other way about.
