Palm Springs or Sedona?

Neither town has a coast, so swimming is a side matter in both. Sedona has the more interesting water: Oak Creek's sandstone chute at Slide Rock and the deeper pools at Grasshopper Point and Red Rock Crossing make a cold, scenic dip after a summer hike.

In Palm Springs swimming means a hotel or rental pool, pleasant but no different from a pool anywhere else. The Pacific is about two hours away over the mountains, and the salty Salton Sea is not for bathing.

Neither town is a place for serious eating, but Palm Springs has a little more range. It has patio brunches and mid-range American restaurants along Palm Canyon Drive, date shakes from the Indio groves, and honest taquerias and panaderias in the eastern valley towns.

Sedona's kitchens are fewer: Southwestern cooking, plenty of vegetarian and health-minded menus, and terraces where the sunset on the red rock does much of the work. The Verde Valley tasting rooms just down the road give it a wine side that Palm Springs lacks.

Palm Springs has a real subject in its mid-century modern architecture, from Albert Frey's houses and the tramway station to the Alexander homes of Twin Palms and Vista Las Palmas. Add the art museum and the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum on Cahuilla history, and a design-minded visitor can fill a day or two.

Sedona has less to see indoors: the Chapel of the Holy Cross set into its butte, a small heritage museum and many galleries. Its most memorable history lies out in the backcountry, at the Palatki and Honanki cliff dwellings and the V Bar V petroglyphs.

Palm Springs at least offers a night out. There are the LGBTQ bars of Arenas Road with their patios and drag nights, retro cocktail lounges and spring pool parties, even if most of it winds down early. Sedona barely competes: a brewpub or resort lounge after dinner is about it, the town goes to bed early ahead of dawn hikes, and the stargazing is the better way to spend the evening.

Both are excellent for the outdoors, but Sedona's red rock country is the bigger draw. Cathedral Rock, Devil's Bridge and Boynton Canyon are reached from town, the slickrock mountain biking is famous, Oak Creek Canyon climbs into the pines and the Grand Canyon is about two hours north.

Palm Springs answers with contrast. The aerial tramway lifts you from the desert floor to pine forest at about 2,600m, the Indian Canyons hide palm oases, and Joshua Tree is an hour away. Its fiercer summer heat cuts hiking back further than Sedona's does.

Sedona has the better spread of outings. Jerome is a mining town clinging to a hillside, and the Verde Canyon Railroad runs through a roadless canyon. The cliff dwellings at Montezuma Castle and Tuzigoot are within half an hour, and Flagstaff opens the way to Walnut Canyon and Wupatki.

Palm Springs has fewer outings, and odder ones: the pine village of Idyllwild, the lived-in Western film set at Pioneertown, the abandoned shoreline and Salvation Mountain at the Salton Sea, and Temecula's wineries. Every one of them, in either place, needs a car.

Both towns are calm, safe and aimed more at adults, so neither is an obvious choice with children, and the difference is one of style. Palm Springs means pool days with set outings: the Living Desert zoo, the tramway with snow at the top in winter, and the Air Museum. Families often stay in the bigger resorts down the valley.

Sedona suits families who want to be out on the land, with the natural slide at Slide Rock, short trails around Bell Rock and open-air jeep tours. It often works best as one stop on a Grand Canyon loop rather than a long stay.

Both places depend on a car. Each has a small walkable core, Palm Springs its flat downtown strip and Sedona its Uptown, and almost everything else needs driving.

The practical details differ. Palm Springs has an airport on the edge of town and good cycling through the modernist neighbourhoods in cooler months. Sedona means a two-hour drive up from Phoenix, crowded trailhead car parks and weekend traffic at the Y, eased slightly by a trailhead shuttle.

Palm Springs is the better shopping stop. It has a real specialism in mid-century furniture, lighting and vintage clothing in the Uptown Design District, the luxury street of El Paseo in Palm Desert and the Cabazon outlets twenty minutes west.

Sedona's shopping is narrower but has its own character: Western art and Native American jewellery, pottery and rugs, the courtyards of Tlaquepaque, and crystal and metaphysical shops. For clothes or department stores, people drive to Phoenix.

Money goes a little further in Palm Springs, and how far depends on the calendar. From winter into spring a boutique hotel or a rental house with its own pool costs resort rates, and festival weekends push them higher still, but in the summer heat those same rooms turn into a bargain. Meals cost what they do in any American resort town, and the hire car is a fixed extra all year.

In Sedona the dearest months are the mild ones in spring and autumn, which are exactly when most people want to hike, so the best time to come is also the most expensive. The paid extras weigh more here too, because guided jeep tours, balloon flights and spa treatments are much of what visitors travel for. The cheap pleasure is the landscape itself, where a parking pass and a packed lunch cover a full day on the red rock trails.

Palm Springs has the bigger events. Coachella and Stagecoach fill the polo grounds in Indio each April, the McCallum Theatre brings touring shows, and the valley casinos book well-known acts, while drag cabaret and piano bars fill evenings in town.

Sedona has a modest calendar of chamber music, local theatre and its long-running film festival, but no concert hall. Anyone wanting a proper show drives to Flagstaff or Phoenix.

Both are first-rate places to slow down, in quite different ways. Palm Springs is built on hot water. The Agua Caliente bathhouse downtown and the spring-fed motel pools of Desert Hot Springs make soaking the centre of a stay, with lazy afternoons by the pool in between.

Sedona has no hot springs at all and offers retreat culture instead: resort spas facing the red rock, yoga, meditation and breathwork, and sunrise walks to the vortexes. Pick Palm Springs to soak and Sedona to be guided.