Sweeping from the borders of the southern plains all the way to the Pacific Ocean, the states of the Southwest are made up of vast deserts, high mountains, large rivers, and magnificent forests. This is the region that houses the mighty Grand Canyon and the ancient Sequoia trees of northern California, the wide Mojave Desert, and both the high Rocky Mountains and the rugged Sierra Nevada.

The Southwest has states with small populations, such as New Mexico, and the state with the largest population, California. It is both incredibly rural, with thousands of square miles where no human lives, and also incredibly urban. Orange County in California, for example, has more people living there than live on the entire continent of Australia!

There are rivers such as the Rio Grande, the Colorado, and the Sacramento running through the Southwest, and they drain millions of square miles of land into the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of California, and the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean runs along the western edge of the region, and on that coast there are fine natural harbors such as San Francisco Bay, Drake's Bay, and San Diego Harbor, to name just a few.