Prescott

Prescott was founded in the 1860s as the capital of the newly created Arizona Territory, chosen in part to plant the government in a mining region away from the Confederate sympathies farther south. It grew quickly as gold and other minerals drew prospectors to the surrounding hills, and it built itself in a New England style with a courthouse square and clapboard homes rather than the adobe of southern Arizona.

The town's most famous stretch is Whiskey Row, a block of Montezuma Street lined with saloons that served the miners, cowboys, and gamblers of the frontier era. When a great fire swept the block in 1900, patrons reportedly carried the ornate bar of the Palace Saloon across the street to keep drinking while the buildings burned, then hauled it back once the row was rebuilt. That bar and its story survive, part of a downtown that wears its Wild West history proudly.

The highlands around Prescott are the homeland of the Yavapai people, who lived across this pine-and-granite country for generations before the miners and soldiers arrived. Their descendants remain here today as the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe, whose reservation adjoins the town, a living continuation of the people whose land this has always been.

The wider region also holds the deep history of earlier cultures, including the Sinagua whose sites lie in the nearby Verde Valley, ancestors connected to today's Hopi and other Pueblo peoples. The name Prescott honors the historian William H. Prescott, chosen by the territorial founders, but the land beneath the Victorian town carries a far older Native story that continues in the communities of the region.

What sets Prescott apart is its setting. At a mile high, the town sits amid the ponderosa pine forests of the central highlands, where the air is cool and fragrant and the seasons turn in earnest, from summer thunderstorms to winter snow. The Prescott National Forest wraps around the town with trails, campgrounds, and quiet backroads through the pines.

The region's showpiece is the Granite Dells, a surreal landscape of rounded, weathered granite boulders piled and stacked along the shores of Watson and Willow Lakes just north of town. Formed as ancient granite fractured and eroded into rounded shapes, the Dells offer wonderful hiking among the rocks and calm water for paddling, one of the most distinctive and beloved landscapes in central Arizona.

Summer is Prescott's most popular season, when its mile-high elevation keeps it far cooler than the desert below, drawing visitors up from Phoenix for relief from the heat. Warm days, cool nights, and afternoon monsoon storms make it a fine time for hiking, festivals, and rodeos, and the town's famous Fourth of July celebrations are a highlight.

Fall brings crisp air and a touch of color, a beautiful and quieter time in the pines. Winter is genuinely cold for Arizona, with snow that dusts the town and the surrounding forest and lends the Victorian streets a New England feel. Spring warms gradually, greening the hills and stirring the lakes, and mild days return for hiking the Dells. With four real seasons, Prescott offers something different in every one.

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