Buckeye

Buckeye is the western edge of the Valley — for years it was farm fields and open desert, and it's now repeatedly cited as one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. The name comes from the Buckeye Canal, named after Ohio (the Buckeye State) by a settler from that state and developed in the 1880s.

Skyline Regional Park is Buckeye's outdoor gem: an 8,700-acre city park in the White Tank foothills with miles of hiking and mountain-biking trails, a campground, and some of the darkest skies close to metro Phoenix for stargazing.

Historic downtown Buckeye along Monroe Avenue keeps a small agricultural-town character, with murals, a few longtime cafés, and community events like the annual Buckeye festival season. The town's huge new master-planned developments — Verrado at the base of the White Tank Mountains chief among them — have brought a walkable Main Street, golf, and a steady festival calendar.

Come for space and quiet rather than a packed itinerary: trails at sunrise, a small-town main street, and skies dark enough to see the Milky Way. Summer is intensely hot this far from the urban core, so the cooler months are the time to explore.