It wasn't much more than a goat path. Or, more appropriate for the setting, a desert bighorn sheep path. With the wind swirling about us and a lapis lazuli sky overhead, we played connect-the-dots with the small stacked cairns that looped across the sandstone amphitheater and took us higher and higher. This was Canyonlands National Park at its best.

In the far eastern reaches of Arizona, nestled in the pass between the Chiricahua and Dos Cabezas mountains, 20 miles or so from its border with New Mexico, sits the well-preserved remains of Fort Bowie, which was established as a National Historic Site in 1972. Apache Pass, and its year-round water supply, hosted Fort Bowie from 1861 to 1894 and was a key site in the decades-long battle against the Apache.

It was, John Muir recounted during the summer of 1888, “awful in bulk and majesty, filling all the view like a separate, newborn world, yet withal so fine and so beautiful it might well fire the dullest observer to desperate enthusiasm.” “It” was Mount Rainier, and it astounded Muir when he saw it for the first time, and his words remain true today.

Far from the official "Ring of Fire," there are older, now extinct, chains of volcanoes to be explored in the National Park System.