Granite Dells

This high central Arizona country is the homeland of the Yavapai people, who lived across these mountains and valleys for generations before American settlement, and whose descendants belong to the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe and other Yavapai nations today. The mild uplands, with their springs and game, made the region a good place to live long before the town arrived.

Prescott itself grew up quickly in the 1860s after gold was found in the nearby creeks, and it served for a time as the territorial capital of Arizona. The Dells sat just outside town, a rugged boulder country used for grazing and recreation, and in the early twentieth century Watson and Willow Lakes were created by damming Granite Creek for water and irrigation, turning the granite maze into the lake-and-rock landscape people come to see today.

The rock of the Dells is a very old granite, roughly 1.4 billion years old, that cooled and hardened deep underground from molten rock. Granite of that kind tends to crack into a rough grid of joints as it forms, and those cracks are the key to everything that came later.

Once the granite was slowly uncovered at the surface, weather went to work along the joints. Water and frost pried into the cracks and rotted the rock from the edges inward, wearing the sharp corners off each block first, since corners are attacked from more sides at once. Over long ages that rounding left the smooth, piled, boulder-on-boulder look the Dells are famous for, a process geologists call spheroidal weathering. The result is a landscape that looks stacked by hand but was shaped entirely by time and water.

The Dells sit where high desert, chaparral, and lakeshore all meet, so the wildlife is unusually varied. The lakes draw herons, cormorants, ducks, and migrating waterbirds, and bald eagles and ospreys hunt over the open water in the cooler months. Among the boulders, lizards bask on warm rock and rock squirrels dart between the crevices.

The surrounding scrub and juniper hold mule deer, javelina, coyotes, and the occasional bobcat, and rattlesnakes shelter in the rocks, so it pays to watch where you put your hands while scrambling. Songbirds fill the shoreline brush, and the mix of stone, water, and open sky makes the Dells a favorite with birdwatchers as well as climbers.

Spring is a lovely time in the Dells, with wildflowers in the crevices, mild days, and the lakes full from winter runoff. Fall is just as good, cool and clear, with golden light on the granite and the crowds thinning after summer.

Summer stays far more comfortable here than down in the desert thanks to the mile-high elevation, though midday sun on the shadeless rock is strong and the monsoon brings dramatic afternoon storms. Winter is cold and quiet, and a rare dusting of snow on the rounded boulders is one of the Dells' most beautiful and least expected sights.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.