Prescott

We climbed out of Phoenix’s summer furnace and into Prescott’s pine-scented air in under two hours, and the temperature drop alone felt like arriving somewhere new. At over 5,300 feet, Prescott sits in a transition zone where saguaro cactus gives way to ponderosa forest, and the town itself leans hard into its territorial history — Arizona’s first capital, before the seat moved to Tucson and then Phoenix. Lia and I circled the domed Yavapai County Courthouse on the square, its lawn shaded by elms, and understood immediately why locals call this “everybody’s hometown.”

Whiskey Row and the courthouse square

Just off the square runs Whiskey Row, a stretch of Montezuma Street once lined with more than twenty saloons serving miners and cowboys fresh off the trail. Several historic bars survive, including the Palace Saloon, its ornate Brunswick bar reportedly carried out during the Great Fire of 1900 and set up across the street to keep serving drinks while the block burned. We had a beer there beneath tin ceilings and old rodeo photographs, then wandered the square’s antique shops and Western art galleries until the afternoon light turned the courthouse’s granite facade gold.

Granite Dells and Watson Lake

The next morning we drove a few minutes north to the Granite Dells, a surreal landscape of rounded, stacked boulders that look almost sculpted, wrapping around the still water of Watson Lake. We rented a kayak and paddled between granite formations reflected perfectly in the lake’s surface, startling a great blue heron that had been fishing silently in the reeds. Rock climbers dotted the higher boulders, and hikers threaded the Peavine Trail along an old rail bed nearby. It’s a strange, beautiful contrast to the Victorian downtown just minutes away — one moment you’re browsing antique saddles, the next you’re paddling through what looks like another planet.

Getting There

Prescott Regional Airport has limited commercial service, so most visitors fly into Phoenix Sky Harbor and drive roughly 100 miles north on Highway 17 and then Highway 69, a trip of about two hours that climbs steadily through desert scrub into pine forest. The drive is popular as a summer escape for Phoenix residents, and traffic can thicken on Friday afternoons and Sunday evenings accordingly. Once in town, downtown Prescott and the courthouse square are entirely walkable, though a car helps for reaching the Dells and surrounding trailheads.