Flanking Tucson to either side, the two sections of SAGUARO NATIONAL PARK offer visitors a rare and enthralling opportunity to stroll through strange desert "forests" of monumental, multi-limbed saguaro (pronounced suh-WAH-row ) cactuses. Each saguaro can grow up to fifty feet tall and weigh up to eight tons, but it takes around 150 years to do so. Whatever you may have seen in the movies, you can drive a long way in Arizona without seeing one; saguaro are unique to the Sonora Desert, and so the thrill when you finally encounter a thousand at once is deeply satisfying. Both segments of the park tend to be seen on short forays from the city: in summer, it's far too hot to do more than pose for photographs, dwarfed beneath some especially eccentric specimen, and there is in any case no lodging, or even permanent campground, in either segment.
The Tucson Mountain District , which stretches north from the Desert Museum around fifteen miles west of downtown Tucson, on the far side of the mountains, charges no admission fee. Beyond the visitor center (daily 8.30am5pm; tel 520/733-5158, www.nps.gov/sagu ), the nine-mile Bajada Loop Drive not fully paved, but always passable to ordinary vehicles loops through a wonderland of weird saguaro, offering plentiful short hiking trails and photo opportunities. Signal Hill is especially recommended, for its petroglyphs and superb sunset views.
To reach the eastern section of the park, the Rincon Mountain District ($6 per vehicle; tel 520/733-5153), drive seventeen miles east of town, first along Broadway Boulevard and then Old Spanish Trail. Here, too, short trails such as the quarter-mile Desert Ecology Trail lead off the eight-mile Cactus Forest Drive (daily 7amsunset), but many visitors come specifically to hike far from the road, up into the mountains. The saguaro cactuses thin out almost as soon as you start climbing the Tanque Verde Ridge Trail, which leads in due course to a hundred-mile network of remote footpaths through thickly forested canyons.