Beaver Creek or Tucson?

Neither place has a coast, so in both of them swimming means the hotel pool. What the pool is for differs. In Beaver Creek it is usually heated and outdoors, a warm soak with snow around it. In Tucson it is where you escape the desert heat for much of the year.

Natural water is just as scarce in both. Beaver Creek has the small, chilly snowmelt beach at Nottingham Lake down in Avon. Tucson has the creek pools in Sabino Canyon, which form after the rains and then disappear.

Tucson has a cuisine of its own, and that settles it. Sonoran Mexican cooking is done properly in the family kitchens along South 12th Avenue and in the south side barrios: mesquite-grilled carne asada, paper-thin flour tortillas, the bacon-wrapped hot dog. Desert ingredients such as tepary beans and prickly pear add a local note.

Beaver Creek feeds you well but predictably, with elk, lamb and trout in polished resort dining rooms. The setting is what you remember, such as a sleigh ride up to an on-mountain lodge for dinner. For everyday prices, people head down to Avon and Edwards.

Tucson has real history to show. Mission San Xavier del Bac and its gilded, painted interior, the adobe row houses of Barrio Viejo and the Native American collections of the Arizona State Museum fill two or three good days. The Pima Air & Space Museum, beside its field of retired military aircraft, adds something few cities can match.

Beaver Creek was built as a ski village around 1980. Its stone-and-timber plaza and outdoor sculpture take about an hour, and to see the Rockies' mining past you have to drive.

Tucson offers an actual night out, if a casual one: dive bars and patios on Fourth Avenue, cocktail bars and rooftops on Congress Street, and warm evenings for drinking outdoors. It is liveliest during university term. Beaver Creek winds down after après-ski by the plaza fire pits, dinner and perhaps a hotel lounge, and anyone wanting more drives over to Vail.

Both are strong outdoor destinations, but Beaver Creek is built entirely around its mountain. Its skiing runs from the village up to about 3,500m on quiet slopes linked to Bachelor Gulch, Arrowhead and Vail, which puts it in a different class from Mount Lemmon's small ski area. Summer brings aspen forest, the Holy Cross Wilderness, gold-medal fly-fishing and rafting on the Eagle and Colorado Rivers.

Tucson's strength is the desert right outside town: giant saguaros in the national park on either side of the city, canyon trails at Sabino and Catalina State Park, and a road that climbs from cactus to pine. Its outdoor season runs the other way round, at its best from autumn to spring and limited to the early mornings in summer.

Tucson's outings are more varied. Tombstone trades on the Wild West, Bisbee is a steep copper-mining town of Victorian houses and mine tours, Tubac is an artists' village with the Tumacácori mission ruins nearby, and there are grassland wineries around Sonoita and the Biosphere 2 dome. All of them are within about an hour and a half.

From Beaver Creek the choices are mostly other mountain towns: Vail's pedestrian village, silver-mining Leadville at over 3,000m and gold-rush Breckenridge. They are pleasant but much alike, and in both places you need a car.

Both work well for families, but in different seasons and in different ways. Beaver Creek is a self-contained ski village with a large, well-run ski school and gentle learning terrain. Older children can roam the car-free plaza, there is an ice rink, warm cookies are handed out when the lifts close, and summer adds ropes courses and mini golf.

Tucson's attractions are spread across a city: the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Reid Park Zoo, the children's museum, the planetarium and the giant aircraft. It copes far better with a bad-weather day, but you need a car and it is best from October to April. In Beaver Creek, altitude and cold can be hard on the youngest children.

Once you are in Beaver Creek you hardly need a car. The village core is pedestrian, outdoor escalators climb between the levels, many lodgings are ski-in ski-out, and free shuttles run down to the base at Avon. The difficulty is getting there, either through the small airport at Eagle or over mountain passes from Denver that winter storms can close.

Tucson is the opposite: easy to drive, with mild traffic and easy parking, but hard to manage without a car. The single streetcar line covers only downtown, Fourth Avenue and the university, while the national park, Sabino Canyon and the mission all need a hire car.

Tucson has things worth taking home: Native American jewellery, Tohono O'odham baskets, pottery and Mexican folk art, plus vintage shops on Fourth Avenue. Each winter it hosts a gem and mineral show that draws collectors from around the world. Beaver Creek offers a short browse around the plaza, mostly technical ski wear, western boots and galleries of bronze sculpture, all at resort prices.

This is the widest gap between the two. Beaver Creek is among the most expensive vacations in North America. Lodging is mostly luxury, lift tickets and ski school cost a lot, and staying down the valley in Avon only trims the bill. Summer is cheaper, but never cheap.

Tucson is reasonable for an American city, with moderately priced mid-range hotels and plenty of cheap Mexican food. The hire car and tipping add up, and winter, above all during the gem show, is the dearest time. The summer heat brings real bargains.

Tucson has its own resident companies: the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, Arizona Opera and the Arizona Theatre Company. Touring Broadway shows play Centennial Hall, the restored Fox Theatre hosts concerts, and mariachi runs deep in the city. Most of the programme falls between autumn and spring.

Beaver Creek relies on touring shows at the intimate Vilar Performing Arts Center, and on summer, when Bravo! Vail's orchestras and the Vail Dance Festival fill the open-air amphitheatre twenty minutes away. Their best seasons fall at opposite times of year.

Tucson has the deeper tradition. It is one of the original homes of the American destination spa, and its resorts in the Catalina foothills run full programmes of desert walks, fitness and meditation, with quiet winter evenings under wide skies.

Beaver Creek's version is the big resort spa after a day's skiing, with outdoor hot tubs in the snow. It does have something Tucson lacks, natural hot springs, at Glenwood Springs about an hour away.