When the Open Road Calls

When the Open Road Calls WITH PHOTOGRAPHS by JOSEF MUENCH

For the past twenty-two wonderful years, we've been roaming Arizona. You'd think there would be no more pictures left for my photographerhusband and son to take; that I'd had time to write about every bend in the roads that make a spider-web pattern over the state. Yet we always find something new. Each season paints fresh pictures on canvases we've used time and again. Even where the indefatigable Highway Department hasn't found a shortcut into fresh terrain, or laid blacktop where once we took our dusty way, surprises wait: byways we'd never chanced upon before; whole spreads of landscape to set camera and typewriter clicking. Take, for example, the time we climbed a steep little road off State 77 and found Christmas-nested in a breathtaking bowl of the Dripping Springs Mountains. A truant sun sneaked through stormclouds to highlight the little mining camp where claims had been staked out on that auspicious date in 1902.

Often we retrace our steps to a favorite corner, wanting to confirm that the views were as intriguing as memory painted and found facets never fully appreciated before. No two sunsets are the same, not even when spread over an identical patch of sky or silhouetting a particular pair of saguaros we'd grown to recognize as friends.

So every trip into our favorite visiting state is an adventure-looked forward to with eagerness-recalled with nostalgia. We love every bit of it. People ask what part of Arizona we like best. How can we answer that, when each point of the compass is a gateway to fascinating routes through a medley of desert, mountains, canyons, cities and sunrises? You can't see the whole state in a matter of two weeks, but I could pack much of it into a ten-day trip of which we're particularly fond. Would you care to come along? Touching little towns out of the West's past, delving into several of her splendid, but not so much talked of, canyons-with shiny new cities and expanses of heartwarming open country-it would be a kind of travel potpourri. We'd include the almost bewildering variety of Arizona's charm: Indians and open copper pits; underground caverns and her highest mountains; pine-scented