Road trips from Southern California: Arizona

Shafts of light make for magical scenes in the Lower Antelope Canyon.  (Jason La / Los Angeles Times )

You can barely find Horseshoe Bend from the highway. The parking lot is small and dusty. Furry caterpillars meander across the 3/4 -mile trail. But if you trudge on, what you encounter is nothing short of amazing.   (Jason La / Los Angeles Times )

The town languished until a couple of entrepreneurs began offering passenger train rides from Williams to the Grand Canyon. Themed businesses followed, along with a small museum in the former Santa Fe railroad depot.
Pictured: Twister’s Soda Fountain in downtown Williams.   (Jay Jones / For The Times )

Just up the road from Sunset Crater is Wupatki National Monument, with picturesque scenery and pueblo ruins. The largest of these is the Wupatki Pueblo, which in the 12th century had 100 rooms holding as many residents.  (Greg Bryan / AP)

Less affected by corporate trappings and homogenization than Phoenix, Tucson retains its old-world, Mexican and Southwestern charm. Among the city’s many cultural pursuits is a vibrant and diverse live music scene.  (Charlie Vascellaro / Los Angeles Times)

Meteor Crater, a pit as round as any moon crater, is more than 4,000 feet across and deep enough to swallow a 60-story building. It is pretty much all there is, and yet an estimated 230,000 people still come to see it each year.  (HO / AFP / Getty Images)

Eons ago, seismic activity in what is now northern Arizona chopped a chunk about half the size of Catalina Island off the North Rim. It came to rest between the rims of the chasm on the northern side of the Colorado River. The top of the plateau is flat, and its flanks are steeply terraced, falling away from points along the edge that overlook a canyon land unknown to most tourists.

-- Suan Spano

  (Susan Spano / Los Angeles Times )

Call me an L.A. snob, but Phoenix has always struck me as very functional, perfectly livable but hardly cutting-edge. So I was skeptical when my cousins Hank and Tom described a flourishing alternative art scene around downtown Phoenix.   (Bryan Chan / Los Angeles Times)

It isn’t often that a weekend getaway with a toddler revolves around a fire station and a high-altitude saloon whose patrons roar up on Harleys. But a visit to this tiny, cliff-hugging town is bound to be full of some pretty weird moments.  (Dennis Sigman / Los Angeles Times)

The Skywalk is the biggest gimmick in a many-pronged Hualapai plan to make the canyon pay. Add in the reservation’s other attractions, —and they amount to a sort of alternative-universe Grand Canyon experience. The Hualapai call it Grand Canyon West.

  (David McNew / Getty Images)

They say ghosts walk the streets of this dusty desert town. It’s easy to understand why. With a name like Tombstone and a frenzied history of bloodshed, this outpost near the southwestern edge of the United States has a reputation that’s ... well, haunted.  (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Photographic opportunities abound at the Painted Desert, a colorful collection of hills, buttes and mesas carved by millions of years of erosion. The Blue Mesa Trail carries you into the bowels of the Painted Desert’s badlands, an alien-like landscape strewn with kaleidoscopic petrified wood.   (Eric Draper / AP Photo)