Arizona Sonora Desert Museum
by Jane St. Clair

The Arizona Sonora Desert Museum is three places in one. It’s hiking trails with gorgeous, panoramic views of the desert. It’s also a botanical garden, and a zoo. This makes it the Number One attraction in Tucson.

The first time I went to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum I didn’t pay attention to the various spiders, insects and snakes. However, after I lived in Arizona a while, I became very interested in which one was which.

If you don’t know one snake from another, you’ll mix up a nice king snake with a deadly coral. A plain brown house spider is harmless. A Brown Recluse Spider leaves a bite that turns into an ulcer that hurts for months. Little scorpions are more dangerous than big ones. Luckily, the Arizona Desert Museum has all these varieties so you can learn one from another.

Besides reptiles and insects, you also get to see all kinds of desert animals at this outdoor museum. Coyote, big horn sheep, elk deer and desert turtles all have nice habitats there. You’ll see animals you won’t see anywhere else, like ravens and javelina.

I like the prairie dog village with their funny little heads popping up and down out of their holes.

The museum has a great exhibit about animals that live underground to escape the terrible summer heat. You go into this dark tunnel and then you can peep at them in their burrows. Most of them, like kit foxes and kangaroo rats, sleep all day.

This being the American Southwest, there’s a big indoor exhibit on the geology of the mountains here – how they formed, how the desert itself formed after once being a gigantic sea, and what things looked like here millions of years ago.

The indoor exhibits like the geology and reptile house are really nice in summer because they are cool inside. There’s also an amazing hummingbird exhibit, as well as an aviary.

As you walk around the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, you will love to take in the beautiful, panoramic overlooks of the desert. These alone are worth the price of admission.

My favorite part of the museum is a trail that shows you how the land,
plants and animals change as you climb up a local mountain. At the bottom is the desert, but as you make your way up, you come across ponderosa, pine forest, and many other ecosystems. This is what makes the Tucson area one of the most biologically diverse in the planet.

Plan on spending an entire day at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Besides the natural beauty of the place, you’ll love their fancy restaurants and awesome gift store.

Arizona Sonora Desert Museum has a terrific website not only with information on hours and tickets, but just about the desert in general.

Go here.