Arizona is authentic. It’s too hot to fake it, too rugged to tell tall tales, too beautiful to commit to the hard sell. All of its institutions, its attractions, and even its mythologies were forged through hard experience — trial and error.

This is even true of the land, built by the movement and explosion of the earth — canyons ripped open and mountains kicked up over millennia of shaking and oozing. This roiling has provided a wonderland of diversity, building — all at once — hot and verdant desert scrublands, cool evergreen mountain forests, dry sweeping grasslands, and red-rock, river-carved, fairy-tale canyons, all of which merge with a horizon lit most evenings with postcard-ready sunsets. It remains one of the most exotic destinations in North America, with endless variety, iconic scenery, and a dark history of which the world has never tired.

You will be surprised and changed by Arizona. Here you can easily happen upon an old pioneer graveyard, forgotten and ignored, on a strip of undeveloped desert right next to a gathering of just-built dream homes. This may be the perfect image for the dichotomies of this landscape. Everything here is either ancient or five minutes old.

There’s a reason all those road movies feature scenes in the Grand Canyon State. There’s no better way to see all the state has to offer than Discover Arizona to pile in a car and hit the open road. Less than a day’s drive from anywhere, you can discover something unexpected, whether it be the calm and sunny ease of life along the lower Colorado, where houseboats and water-skiers pass by great monuments to engineering, or a chance meeting with a rare tropical bird hiding out in the riparian mist of a sky island.

In many a traveler’s imagination, this place is the home to rattlesnakes, tumbleweeds, and vast tracts of arid wilderness. Luckily, Arizona still has all of these; there are still trackless spaces to explore. But the face Arizona shows to most of the world belies the leaps this once isolated territory has made. The youngest state in the lower 48 is one of the fastest-growing regions in the nation, and while near constant growth makes for sometimes rancorous debates about land use and natural resources, it serves to create in Arizona a dynamism — a flux that perpetuates itself. It is never boring here, and it is always beautiful and unknowable. There is always something, or someone, being created anew . . . changing . . . blooming.