Hiking in the American Southwest

White sand dunes at White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. The park offers other-worldly scenery, bringing to mind a blizzard or a beach when in fact it is a desert. Strolling from bright marker to marker across white dunes, as the wind obliterated my footprints, I could have been in a blizzard or on a beach.

Cactuses and spring flowers on the Norris Trail of Saguaro National Park in Arizona. The park, divided into two districts with the city of Tucson in between them, offers hikers sunny, peaceful trails.

Deep inside Bear Canyon, seven waterfalls gurgled amid rocky walls studded with cactus and spring flowers. This 8-mile (13-kilometer) round-trip hike in Sabino Canyon Recreation Area, just north of Tucson, is a parade of Southwest wilderness bests.

Two-story-high saguaros, ocotillo bushes tipped with scarlet blooms and blossoming palo verde trees border the steeply rising switchbacks, falcons soared as dusk settled onto one of the densest concentrations of saguaros in the Sonoran desert, many more than a century old.