USA - Southwest The Place
Wherever you stand in the Southwest there will be, on one horizon or another, the spirit-healing blue shape of mountains. The Southwest is high - an immense tableland broken by the high ridges of the southern Rocky Mountains - and dry, with annual precipitation varying drastically with altitude. This highness and dryness affects the air, making it oddly transparent and adding a clarity to everything one sees. The few minutes required to travel from the Rio Grande in downtown Albuquerque to the top of the Sandia Ski Basin takes one through five of North America's biological life zones - from the Upper Sonoran Desert to the cool spruce forests of the Arctic-Alpine zone.
A man tries to explain why he has returned to this empty land from a lonely, crowded California city. He looks down into the immense geological sink which spreads below the southwest slope of the Chuska Mountains, and purveys a wilderness of sun-baked stone stretching into the distance. Everything is worn, eroded and tortured. The desert teems with life, but there is no life here. Not even cactus or lizard survives, nor an insect for it to feed upon. Map-makers would call it Desolation Sink. "The Navajo name for this," he says, "is Beautiful Valley."
See also our online city guide to Las Vegas.