Hualapai Mountain Park

A 9,000-hectare county park in the Hualapai Mountains, about 20 kilometres southeast of downtown. The drive up alone is worth doing — the road switchbacks through changing scenery from yucca and ocotillo to oak woodland to dense pine forest.

At the top there is a network of trails, picnic areas, a small campground, and a handful of rustic CCC-built stone cabins from the 1930s that can be rented for the night. Summer temperatures here run 10 to 15°C cooler than in Kingman, which makes it a popular escape for desert residents from June through September.

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The park rises so abruptly above the desert floor that you climb through four distinct vegetation zones in a single twenty-minute drive. The peak summit, Hualapai Peak, tops out at 2,560 metres — high enough that the elk herd planted here from Yellowstone in the 1940s has thrived, and high enough that the pines and ponderosa look genuinely surprising after the cactus flats below.

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