One of our finest writers about the American West brings all his experience to bear on a wide-ranging, exhilarating of the Southwest for the National Geographic Directories series. William Kittredge has spent part of every year for the past two decades in and around Arizona. He has travelled the main highways of the area and most of the back roads, and in that time has befriended many of the great local figures of the Southwest. Kittredge will explore the territory that runs from the Grand Canyon south through Phoenix and Tuscan to Nogales. It includes urban sprawl and the desert border with Mexico, Native American pueblos, Agribusiness cotton plantations, salt flat deserts and snowy mountains, semi-defunct mining towns where old-timers like to wear six-guns to the tavern, new age hippie gardening enclaves, and enormous desert parklands- the Grand Canyon, Hopi Villages, Los Alamos. From his unique perspective as part-time resident and full-time observer, Kittredge will introduce us to desert rats at the swap meets on the banks of Colorado, theoretical physicists in Santa Fe, aging druggists from Minnesota who live in year-round retirement towns, Hopi mothers and their daughters, and renegade punk-rock street people, to hear what they're thinking as they confront the complexities of the future.