"Black Canyon City, Arizona" a Phoenix Travel Page by cmboothe

I didn't truly appreciate Arizona until I left to go to Arkansas for college. All I can remember of my former feelings were constant complaints (usually inside my head) about the heat. Then I went away, and began to miss home, and with the nostalgia came a new way of looking at it.

The desert is not a comfortable place. Everything there is either actively trying to hurt you (jumping cholla) or at least ready and willing to hurt you (sun heated rocks). It is dry, rough, demanding, and it doesn't give one inch. Yet, it is the very harshness that drives into your soul. The desert calls upon you to survive, and once you have, you know its value.

The Sonoran desert may look like an alien planet to those people used to green lushness, but to those of us who have earned the right to love it, no words can communicate the depth of our passion. We might leave, we might leave for good, but it never leaves us, and we are the better for it.