Just north of the legendary tourist trap of Tombstone, Arizona, the Dragoon Mountains are a scenic and historically significant spot worth the effort it takes to reach them.
Beautiful and imposing, they look like a giant took a handful of liquid rock and created a series of tall piles like kids sometimes do with wet sand on a beach.
These mountains once served as a base of operations for Cochise, a Chiricahua Apache leader who used the area as a natural fortification against Mexican and United States forces encroaching on their lands.
The Dragoon Mountains take their name from the 3rd U.S. Cavalry Dragoons, who fought against the Chiricahua Apache in the Apache Wars¹.