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PARKS
Prescott National Forest
Arizona
Central Arizona's Prescott National Forest straddles the extremities of the Sonoran Desert and the Bradshaw Mountains—in between, the terrain's gradual metamorphosis encompasses desert grasslands, chaparral, canyon hardwoods, pinion-juniper woodlands, and ponderosa forests.
Lynx Lake
Explore Sycamore Canyon as it eviscerates the Mogollon Rim, laying open a colorful labyrinth of crimson cliffs, red sandstone, white limestone, and lava flows. Over 450 miles of trail snake their way through the Prescott like a sidewinder on the sun-baked desert, as well as along switchbacks up the timbered slopes of towering sentinels like the 7,628-foot Towers Mountain. It's no mirage; river rafters can actually float through the desert in the arid sections of this mystical forest of cactus and sand.
Prescott is also a forest rife with Western folklore—names like Lonesome Pocket, Yellowjacket Gulch, Grief Hill, and Horsethief Basin evoke the West's wilder days. At Battle Flat in 1864, five cowboys held off 150 Indians in a do-or-die gunfight. Gold seekers were constantly skirmishing with native Americans in these parts.
In the early 1860s, Captain Joseph Walker led an expedition of 34 men into Apache territory after being told by an Indian "there's gold in those mountains." One of the members of the expedition, Sam Miller, found what he thought was a dead lynx in a gold-filled creek. He tried to pick it up, it suddenly came back to and life clawed him something fierce—ever since the creek has been known as Lynx Creek.
Follow GORP's advice so they won't be naming any landforms in the forest after you, like Lost Tourist Gulch or Ruined Vacation Bluff.
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[from Outside magazine]
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