119 Fun Facts About Arizona

Arizona became the 48th state in February 1912, on which holiday?

Valentine's Day. The date gave Arizona a second nickname, the Valentine State; it was the last of the 48 contiguous states to join the Union.

Which Arizona desert lizard's saliva gave scientists the hormone behind the drug family that includes Ozempic?

Gila monster. Its hormone works for hours where the human version breaks down in minutes, so it became exenatide, the diabetes drug approved in 2005.

Which deal with Mexico added Arizona's southern strip to the United States?

The Gadsden Purchase. The United States paid $10 million for the strip because the only workable routes for a southern railroad to the Pacific ran through it.

Which government was first to formally organize an Arizona Territory, in 1862?

The Confederate States. Their Arizona was the southern half of New Mexico Territory; a year later the Union drew its own Arizona Territory as the western half instead.

Which town, home of Whiskey Row and the World's Oldest Rodeo, became Arizona's territorial capital in 1864?

Prescott. It lost the capital to a southern rival after three years, won it back a decade later, then lost it for good to Phoenix.

Phoenix was named for a city rising from the ruins of which ancient canal-building culture?

Hohokam farmers left their canals behind around 1450. Settlers who dug the old ditches out again in the 1860s named the town for the bird reborn from its ashes, though one founder had wanted to call it Stonewall.

What do forecasters call the towering walls of dust that thunderstorms push across Phoenix in summer?

Haboob comes from an Arabic word for a strong wind. A thunderstorm's downdraft hits the desert floor and shoves a wall of dust ahead of it that can stand thousands of feet high and miles long.

What is the nickname of the Phoenix metropolitan area?

Valley of the Sun began as a sales pitch: local boosters coined it to sell the Salt River Valley's mild winters to tourists, and the slogan stuck to Phoenix and its neighboring cities.

Which Arizona city was the first in the United States to be named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy, in 2015?

Tucson's UNESCO listing leads with its farming roots: the longest agricultural history of any city in the United States, on land cultivated for some 4,000 years.

Which one-armed major explored the Grand Canyon by boat?

John Wesley Powell lost his right arm at Shiloh and went back to the war as a major. In 1869 he took four boats down a river no one had charted and came out three months later a national hero.

Theodore Roosevelt made the Grand Canyon a monument in 1908; which president signed the 1919 national park act?

Woodrow Wilson signed the act on February 26, 1919. The first bill for a Grand Canyon park had failed in Congress back in 1882, so the canyon waited 37 years as a forest reserve and then a monument.

García López de Cárdenas, the first European known to see the Grand Canyon, was scouting for which conquistador's 1540 expedition?

Coronado came north hunting the fabled Seven Cities of Gold and found none, and Spanish officials judged his expedition a failure. One of its side trips still gave Europe its first sight of the canyon.

What is the highest point in Arizona, at 12,633 feet?

Humphreys Peak is the stump of a far bigger volcano. Much of the mountain is gone, perhaps blasted away as at Mount St. Helens in 1980, perhaps worn down by landslides, water and ice.

Which tribal land in Arizona changes its clocks for daylight saving time while most of the state stays put?

The Navajo Nation reaches into two neighboring states that do change their clocks, so it springs forward with them and keeps one time across all its land.

From March to November, most of Arizona keeps the same clock time as which state?

California springs forward each March onto the hour most of Arizona keeps all year, and the two match until November. Most of Arizona never touches its clocks; it's the Pacific coast that moves.

Old Oraibi, one of the oldest continuously inhabited US villages, belongs to which people?

Hopi families at Old Oraibi split bitterly in 1906 over schooling and other American influences. The losing side left to found a new village, and Oraibi lost much of its population.

Which state touches Arizona at only a single point, the Four Corners?

Colorado sits diagonally across the Four Corners. The 1875 marker may stand as much as 1,800 feet from its intended spot, but an accepted marker is the legal corner, so the states meet exactly there.

Hoover Dam, on Arizona's western border, holds back which reservoir?

Lake Mead filled behind a dam Washington spent 14 years declining to call by its name: after Herbert Hoover left office the Interior Department said Boulder Dam, until Congress restored Hoover's name after World War II.

The 1831 London Bridge, bought in 1968, was rebuilt across a channel of which Arizona reservoir?

Lake Havasu had no water under the bridge at first: chainsaw magnate Robert McCulloch rebuilt it stone by numbered stone on dry land, then dredged a channel beneath it.

NASA trained Apollo astronauts inside which privately owned landmark in northern Arizona?

Meteor Crater belongs to the Barringer family. Daniel Barringer spent 27 years hunting beneath it for a giant iron meteorite, until an astronomer's 1929 analysis argued the impact had vaporized it.

Old Route 66 ran straight through which Arizona park?

Petrified Forest fed and housed Route 66 drivers at its Painted Desert Inn. Interstate 40 later replaced the old highway, whose abandoned roadbed still crosses the park.

John Ford shot Stagecoach, Fort Apache and The Searchers among the buttes of which Arizona landscape?

Monument Valley was pitched to Hollywood by its own trading-post owner: during the Depression, Harry Goulding showed the studios what his valley looked like, and John Ford came out to film Stagecoach.

Which sandstone gorge near Page, with sections called The Crack and The Corkscrew, requires guided tours?

Antelope Canyon was carved by flash floods, and they still arrive with little warning: rain falling miles away can funnel through the slot. Every visitor must go in with a guide.

The vivid blue-green water at Havasu Falls comes from a high concentration of what?

Calcium carbonate dissolved in the creek tints the water and settles out as travertine, building the natural dams behind each pool. The people who live there are named for it: Havasupai means people of the blue-green waters.

Lowell Observatory, where Clyde Tombaugh made his famous 1930 discovery, is in which Arizona city?

Flagstaff has guarded the observatory's view ever since: in 1958 it passed the first law of its kind, limiting searchlights, and in 2001 it was named the world's first International Dark Sky City.

Which world did Arizona adopt as its official state planet in 2024?

Pluto was discovered at an Arizona observatory in 1930, and the 2024 law calls it a planet anyway, 18 years after astronomers demoted it to a dwarf planet.

Which Arizona city refused McDonald's its yellow arches in 1993?

Sedona officials feared golden arches would clash with the red rocks, so McDonald's settled on blue-green ones instead, and the odd-colored sign became a tourist stop in its own right.

Which Route 66 town has a Standin' on the Corner Park thanks to the Eagles' Take It Easy?

Winslow lost its traffic when Interstate 40 bypassed it, and downtown withered. In 1999 the town built the park to cash in on the one lyric that had put it on the map.

Which Arizona mining town, founded by Ed Schieffelin in 1879, is 'The Town Too Tough to Die'?

Tombstone was named for a warning: Army men told Ed Schieffelin the only thing he would find in those hills was his own tombstone, so he gave the name to his first silver claim.

Which gunfighter joined the Earp brothers at the O.K. Corral?

Doc Holliday walked down the street with Virgil, Wyatt and Morgan Earp. The shooting took about 30 seconds and happened in a vacant lot nearby, not in the corral that gave it its name.

Which Apache leader surrendered to General Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, in September 1886?

Geronimo never went home. He lived his last 23 years a prisoner of war, let out for world's fairs and for Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade, where the president refused his plea to return west.

Which copper town on Cleopatra Hill was called 'the wickedest town in the West' in 1903?

Jerome emptied out when its mines closed for good in 1953, shrinking to fewer than 100 people. The few who stayed saved the town by selling it to visitors as a ghost town.

Which Cochise County seat is home to the Copper Queen Mine and the Lavender Pit?

Bisbee's 1917 strike was ended by force: a deputized posse marched more than 1,000 striking miners to the ballpark, loaded them onto rail cars and shipped them out of the state.

Cavers Gary Tenen and Randy Tufts squeezed through a sinkhole crack in 1974 and found which Arizona attraction?

Kartchner Caverns stayed a secret for years. The pair told nobody until 1978, when they let in the Kartchner family, who owned the land, and the public learned only once the state moved to make it a park.

Eight people were sealed inside which Arizona research complex for two years starting in 1991?

Biosphere 2 takes its number from Earth, which its builders counted as Biosphere 1. The crew were shut under glass to test whether people could live in a sealed world of their own.

Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and studio from 1937, is in which Arizona city?

Scottsdale's desert supplied the walls: Wright had his apprentices build the place by hand, setting local rock in wooden forms and binding it with cement and desert sand.

A saguaro rarely sprouts its first arm before reaching about what age?

50 years is the early end, and it takes rain: in drier desert the wait for a first arm can reach 100. A seedling may spend a decade growing its first inch.

What is Arizona's official state bird?

The cactus wren builds its bulky nests deep in cholla and other thorny plants, where the spines keep predators away. Arizona's legislature named it the state bird in 1931.

What is Arizona's official state neckwear?

Bolo tie is apparently a slip for 'bola', the corded throwing weapon of South American gauchos that the tie resembles, and Arizona's law still spells it the old way: Bola tie.

Which desert tree is Arizona's official state tree?

Palo verde is Spanish for 'green tree', and the green is the point: its bark does the work of leaves, so the tree can shed them in a drought and go on making food.

Which stone, often recovered as a by-product at Arizona's copper mines, is the official state gemstone?

Turquoise owes its color to copper: it forms where copper-rich groundwater seeps down through dry rock, which is why copper miners keep finding it.

In 2018 Arizona named which sauropod its state dinosaur?

Sonorasaurus is named for the Sonoran Desert, and its species name honors Richard Thompson, the geology student who spotted the bones. It was a brachiosaur, kin to the long-necked giant of every dinosaur book.

Which nocturnal relative of the raccoon is Arizona's state mammal?

Ringtails are common in the Grand Canyon, yet few visitors ever see one: they sleep by day and climb the cliffs at night, balancing with a tail as long as the body.

Which motto on Arizona's seal means 'God enriches'?

Ditat Deus sits above a miner modeled on prospector George Warren, who was hardly enriched: he bet his stake in a rich copper mine on a footrace against a horse and lost.

The 13 rays on Arizona's flag stand for the original colonies, in colors chosen to honor which country?

Spain's red and gold were the colors its explorers carried into Arizona in 1540. The copper star at the center of the flag stands for the state's mines.

Along with copper, cattle, cotton and citrus, what was the fifth of Arizona's 'Five Cs'?

Climate was the one C nobody dug or grew: the mild winters were sold to visitors and new residents, so it took its place beside the four things Arizona produced.

The Arizona Diamondbacks won the 2001 World Series in their fourth season by beating which team?

The New York Yankees had won the last three World Series and were three outs from a fourth when Arizona rallied in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7.

Who blooped the walk-off single off Mariano Rivera that won Game 7 of the 2001 World Series for Arizona?

Luis Gonzalez had hit 57 home runs that season, yet he won the title with the softest hit of his year: a floater that barely cleared a drawn-in infield and reached the outfield grass.

What unusual amenity sits in right-center field at Chase Field, the Diamondbacks' ballpark?

A swimming pool sits just beyond the right-center fence and is rented out by the game as a suite for 35, so a long home run can end with a splash among the paying guests.

Which Phoenix Suns point guard won back-to-back NBA MVP awards in the mid-2000s?

Steve Nash was 30 when Dallas let him walk in 2004 rather than match Phoenix's offer. He answered with the MVP award in each of his first two seasons back with the Suns.

The Cardinals, the oldest continuously run pro football franchise, moved to Arizona in 1988 from where?

St. Louis was the club's second home after Chicago, where an early owner bought faded maroon jerseys secondhand and called the color 'cardinal red'. The name has now outlasted two moves.

In 2024 the Arizona Coyotes' players, staff and picks moved to a new club in which state?

Utah got the roster because the Coyotes had run out of homes: they spent two seasons in Arizona State's 5,000-seat college arena, and local voters turned down a new rink in 2023.

What do baseball fans call Arizona's spring training circuit?

Cactus League ballparks host half the majors' 30 teams: ten parks around Phoenix for 15 clubs, so most share a stadium with another team. Florida's Grapefruit League takes the other 15.

Which bowl game was founded after Arizona State was left without a bowl bid?

Fiesta Bowl founders wanted a bowl in Arizona with a place reserved for the conference champion. Arizona State promptly won the first one, beating Florida State in 1971.

Arizona State University was founded in 1885 as the Territorial Normal School in which city?

Tempe got its teachers' school from the same 1885 legislature that created the University of Arizona, so the state's two great rivals were born in a single session.

Which Phoenix-born senator was the Republican nominee for president in 1964?

Barry Goldwater left college to run the family's Phoenix department store. His 1964 run ended in a landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson, yet the conservatives he rallied went on to take over the Republican Party.

Which Supreme Court justice grew up on the Lazy B, a remote cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona?

Sandra Day O'Connor graduated near the top of her Stanford law class, yet the only job a law firm would offer her was as a legal secretary.

Which Arizona senator was born on a US naval base in the Panama Canal Zone?

John McCain's birthplace became an issue when he ran for president in 2008, so the Senate passed a resolution without dissent declaring him a natural-born citizen.

Which labor leader, born in Yuma in 1927, co-founded the union that became the United Farm Workers?

Cesar Chavez's family lost its farm near Yuma in the Depression and joined the migrant workers following the harvests from field to field, the same hands he later organized.

A Japanese bomb sank the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor by setting off what?

Ammunition in the forward magazines blew up after the bomb struck, killing 1,177 officers and crewmen. Oil still seeps from the wreck, and the drops are known as the black tears of the Arizona.

Which Jesuit missionary founded Mission San Xavier del Bac in southern Arizona?

Eusebio Francisco Kino hoped to live at the mission but died in 1711 still waiting. The white church that made it famous was finished by Franciscans in 1797, after his own order had been banished from the region.

Arizona is the sixth-largest state; which state is fifth?

New Mexico edges Arizona by about 7,600 square miles. The two began as one territory, and Arizona later lost its northwest corner, today's Las Vegas area, to Nevada.

Which other US state joins Arizona in skipping daylight saving time?

Hawaii lies so far south that its days barely lengthen in summer, so moving the clocks would gain it almost nothing, and it opted out in 1967.

Which president signed the bill that fixed the name 'Arizona' on the new territory?

Abraham Lincoln signed the act on February 24, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. It drew the border north to south, where earlier plans had split the land east to west, and that line is still Arizona's eastern edge.

Which church leader sent the first Latter-day Saint colonizing parties south into Arizona in the 1870s?

Brigham Young's first party turned back in 1873, beaten by the desert, but he ordered more south. Latter-day Saint colonists went on to found towns such as Mesa and Snowflake.

The Mogollon Rim, a line of cliffs across central Arizona, is the edge of what?

The Colorado Plateau breaks off at the Rim. Pine forest runs along the top, and the streams that rise beneath it feed the Salt River, dammed downstream into a chain of desert reservoirs.

In December 1944, 25 German prisoners of war tunneled out of a camp in which Phoenix park?

Papago Park's prisoners hid the tunnel dirt by building a volleyball court. Three of them carried a homemade boat to the Gila River, meaning to float away, and found more mud than water.

Oatman, an old gold-mining town on Route 66, is known for which animals wandering its main street?

Wild burros in Oatman descend from the pack animals gold miners brought in, then turned loose when the mines shut. Their offspring wander down from the hills into town.

Which team did Bill Veeck bring to Arizona for spring training in 1947, the year Larry Doby joined it?

The Cleveland Indians' owner had been living on an Arizona ranch when he bought the club. He moved its camp west and persuaded the New York Giants to come too, and a spring circuit grew from those two teams.

Mail for Supai, an Arizona village deep in a side gorge of the Grand Canyon, still arrives by what means?

Mule train is the only way the post gets in, because Supai lies 8 miles from the nearest road. Most of what the animals carry down the trail is food.

Which secret 1917 German message offered Mexico help in reconquering Arizona and Texas if it fought the United States?

The Zimmermann Telegram was intercepted and decoded by British codebreakers, and the anger when it was published helped build support for America's entry into World War I.

A 1956 collision between two airliners over Arizona's Grand Canyon led Congress to create which federal agency?

The FAA was created in 1958 because the crash, which killed all 128 people aboard, happened in uncontrolled airspace where pilots simply had to see and avoid each other.

Which tiny European state runs an advanced research telescope on Mount Graham in southeastern Arizona?

Vatican City supports the Vatican Observatory, which built the telescope in 1993 after light pollution spoiled the skies over its base at Castel Gandolfo, near Rome.

Which Pixar film's fictional town of Radiator Springs is loosely based on Seligman, a Route 66 stop in Arizona?

Cars director John Lasseter met Seligman barber Angel Delgadillo, who told him how traffic all but vanished from the town on the day the new freeway opened nearby.

Settlers wrongly named Arizona's Montezuma Castle, a five-story cliff dwelling, after an emperor of which civilization?

The Aztecs had no link to it: the Sinagua built the dwelling 90 feet up a limestone cliff, and it had emptied more than 40 years before Montezuma was born.

Which Depression-era bank robber was caught in southern Arizona in 1934 after a hotel fire exposed his gang?

John Dillinger's gang, hiding under aliases on the third floor of the Hotel Congress, asked two firemen to fetch their luggage from the blaze, and that gave them away.

Which animals did the US Army test as pack animals in the 1850s, led by a driver now buried in Quartzsite, Arizona?

Camels came with drivers such as Hadji Ali, hired in 1856 and remembered as Hi Jolly. His grave is a pyramid topped with a copper camel.

AriZona iced tea has no roots in the Southwest: its founders started out delivering beer in which borough?

Brooklyn is where friends Don Vultaggio and John Ferolito began delivering cut-price beer from a Volkswagen bus in 1971. Their tea was nearly called Santa Fe instead.

Which venomous creature, commonly found inside Arizona homes, glows blue-green under an ultraviolet flashlight?

Scorpion cuticle holds fluorescent chemicals, so a black light picks one out at night. The Arizona bark scorpion needs a gap only 1/16 of an inch wide to get indoors.

Which Alfred Hitchcock thriller begins in Phoenix, Arizona, where a secretary steals $40,000 from her employer?

Psycho needed the real city: Hitchcock sent a crew to Phoenix to shoot the opening, and renamed his heroine Marion because a real Mary Crane lived there.

Which police caution is named after a man arrested in Phoenix in 1963, whose case reached the Supreme Court?

The Miranda warning grew from a 5-4 ruling in 1966 that overturned Ernesto Miranda's conviction. After his release he made a modest living autographing police officers' warning cards.

Which future Hollywood director premiered his first feature, Firelight, at a Phoenix theater as a teenager in 1964?

Steven Spielberg's father hired the hall for $400, some 500 people came, and by the director's own account the night made a profit of exactly one dollar.

Which Phoenix-born singer joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975 alongside her then-boyfriend, Lindsey Buckingham?

Stevie Nicks was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix and later built a home in nearby Paradise Valley, where she lived until 2007.

By what name do Arizonans know the collared peccary, a pig-like animal that roams the suburbs of Phoenix in herds?

Javelina look like small boars but belong to a separate family, the peccaries. A musk gland on the back gives them another nickname, the musk hog.

Which big cat, nicknamed El Jefe, was photographed for several years in Arizona's Santa Rita Mountains?

Jaguar sightings north of the border are rare: from 2011 to 2015 El Jefe was the only one verified to be living in the United States, and he is presumed to have gone back to Mexico.

Two Arizona restaurants each claim to have invented which dish by putting a burrito into a deep fryer?

Chimichanga is claimed both by Woody Johnson, who says he fried some burritos as an experiment in 1946, and by Monica Flin, whose burrito is said to have fallen in by accident.

Chandler, Arizona, holds a yearly festival honoring which bird, once farmed there for the plumes on women's hats?

Ostrich farms around Chandler supplied the fashion trade during the 1910s, and the festival that remembers them is held each year at Tumbleweed Park.

Which filmmakers wrote and directed Raising Arizona, the 1987 comedy in which a childless couple steals a quintuplet?

The Coen brothers wanted a film as unlike their dark debut, Blood Simple, as possible. The 'Arizona' of the title is the baby's surname, from furniture magnate Nathan Arizona.

Arizona's giant nuclear power plant stands in desert west of Phoenix, far from any large body of water; what cools it?

Treated sewage from nearby cities and towns is evaporated to cool the plant, the only large nuclear station in the world with no sea, lake or big river beside it.

Yuma, Arizona, grows over 175 crops and is nicknamed the world's winter capital of which salad vegetable?

Lettuce leads the harvest: Yuma County supplies about 90% of all the leafy vegetables grown in the United States between November and March.

Which southern Arizona highway is unique among US Interstates for signing distances in meters and kilometers?

I-19 got its metric signs in 1980, during a national push toward the metric system, yet its speed limits are still posted in miles per hour.

Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in southern Arizona, with its dry air and hard soil, is home to the world's largest what?

Aircraft boneyard is the nickname of the 309th AMARG, which stores thousands of retired planes there: little humidity means little rust, and the ground is firm enough to park on unpaved.

The University of Arizona casts giant telescope mirrors in a laboratory tucked beneath which campus structure?

The stadium's east stands sit above the mirror lab, where molten glass is spun in a rotating furnace to form lightweight honeycomb mirrors up to 8.4 meters across.

Which tribe commissioned and owns the Skywalk, a glass-floored walkway jutting over the edge of the Grand Canyon?

The Hualapai opened the Skywalk in 2007 on their own land at Grand Canyon West, outside the national park, with a drop of 500 to 800 feet directly beneath the glass.

The Phoenix Lights, seen across Arizona on one night in March 1997, became a famous mass sighting of what?

UFOs were what many witnesses reported, among them the state's governor, who years later called the sight 'otherworldly'. A second set of lights was traced to military flares.

Which range east of Phoenix is said to hide the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, named for a German prospector?

Superstition Mountains treasure hunters still look for Jacob Waltz's mine every year, and some have died trying. 'Dutchman' was simply old American slang for a German.

Arizona's Coconino National Forest lies within the largest unbroken stand in North America of which pine?

Ponderosa pines thrive because this part of Arizona is high country: the big stands grow between about 6,500 and 8,000 feet above sea level.

Which Hollywood leading man travelled to Kingman, Arizona, in 1939 to marry the actress Carole Lombard?

Clark Gable used a break in the shooting of Gone with the Wind for the trip, and the couple were married at the rectory of a Methodist church.

A national monument on Arizona's southern border is named for which many-stemmed cactus, rare in the rest of the US?

Organ pipe cactus is common in Mexico but scarce north of the border. Bats pollinate its flowers, and its tennis-ball-sized fruit has been described as tasting better than watermelon.

Which striped sandstone formation near Arizona's northern border is so fragile that hiking permits are drawn by lottery?

The Wave sits on the slopes of the Coyote Buttes with no formal trail or signs leading to it, and so many people want to see it that the last daily permits are drawn two days ahead.

Which river meander near Page, Arizona, is viewed from a cliff-top overlook 1,000 feet above the water?

Horseshoe Bend lies about 5 miles downstream of the dam at Page, and geologists point to it as a superb example of an entrenched meander.

Which peak in Arizona's Santa Catalina Mountains has the southernmost ski area in the continental United States?

Mount Lemmon is named for botanist Sara Plummer Lemmon, who reached the 9,171-foot summit with her husband by horse and on foot in 1881.

Which Arizona mountain holds more than twenty optical telescopes on land leased from the Tohono O'odham?

Kitt Peak was chosen in 1958 as the site of a national observatory, and its domes stand on the mountain under a perpetual lease agreed with the tribe.

Which drink did Arizona make its official state drink in 2019 after a high school student lobbied a lawmaker?

Lemonade only got through on a second try: senators first voted the bill down 12-18, and one of them proposed the margarita instead.

The crystalline basement rocks at the bottom of Arizona's Grand Canyon are known collectively by which Hindu god's name?

Vishnu Basement Rocks take their name from Vishnu Temple, a canyon butte that geologist Clarence Dutton named because it reminded him of an Asian pagoda.

Which crested dinosaur, first found in northern Arizona in 1940, is shown spitting venom in the film Jurassic Park?

Dilophosaurus could do neither trick in life: the venom and the neck frill were invented for the story, which also made the animal smaller than the real one.

What do ecologists call the isolated, forested mountain ranges that rise out of the desert in southeastern Arizona?

Sky islands earn the name because each range is ringed by arid lowland, so its pine and oak woodland is cut off from the next range like land surrounded by sea.

Which Fred Harvey Company architect designed Hermit's Rest and the Desert View Watchtower at the Grand Canyon?

Mary Colter was one of the few female architects of her day. She conceived Hermit's Rest as a folly, as if a reclusive mountain man had wired it together himself.

Which cocktail was first mixed at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, in an early version made with crème de cassis and lime?

Tequila sunrise in its familiar orange-juice-and-grenadine form came later, from two bartenders in Sausalito in the early 1970s, where Mick Jagger took a liking to it.

Which ice-cream chain, known for folding mix-ins into scoops on a frozen slab, opened its first store in Arizona?

Cold Stone Creamery was started in 1988 by Donald and Susan Sutherland, who wanted ice cream that was neither hard-packed nor soft-serve. Store number 0001 is still open.

Which country-pop singer won two Grammys with his 1967 recording of Jimmy Webb's song By the Time I Get to Phoenix?

Glen Campbell was not the first to record it: Johnny Rivers had cut the song in 1965, and Jimmy Webb drew its story from a breakup of his own.

Which shock-rock band began as the Earwigs, formed by Phoenix high school cross-country teammates for a talent show?

Alice Cooper started in 1964 when 16-year-old Vincent Furnier, a student at Cortez High School, roped in four teammates because he was eager to enter the lettermen's talent show.

The Phoenix Zoo, soon after opening, hosted the 'world herd' that rescued which Middle Eastern species from extinction?

Arabian oryx thought to be the last few of their kind were gathered in Phoenix for Operation Oryx, and their descendants were later released back into their native deserts.

At a museum in Sahuarita, Arizona, visitors can descend into a silo that still holds which 1960s nuclear missile?

Titan II is the missile on show, an inert one still standing in its silo. Of the 54 Titan II complexes that once stood on alert, this is the only one open to the public.

Which Arizona Cardinals player left the NFL to enlist in the Army after September 11 and died in Afghanistan?

Pat Tillman had been the 226th pick of the 1998 draft, out of Arizona State. He enlisted with his brother Kevin, who served alongside him.

Which Marine from Sacaton, Arizona, appears in the famous photograph of the flag being raised on Iwo Jima?

Ira Hayes, a Pima, became the subject of a ballad that Johnny Cash made popular nationwide in 1964, after a film about his life inspired songwriter Peter La Farge.

Which Arizona town, southern terminus of the Grand Canyon Railway, was the last on Route 66 bypassed by Interstate 40?

Williams held out until October 13, 1984, because lawsuits kept the final stretch of freeway from being built around it. Newspapers the next day reported the essential end of US 66.

In 2011 Arizona named which Old West revolver, nicknamed the Peacemaker, as its official state firearm?

Colt Single Action Army won a survey of residents on which Old West gun deserved the honour, and Arizona became only the second state to have an official firearm.

Arizona is home to 13 kinds of which venomous reptile, more than any other US state?

Rattlesnakes come in more varieties here than anywhere else in the country, and one of them, the Arizona black rattlesnake, shows social behavior reminiscent of mammals.