Northern Arizona University

Northern Arizona University was founded in eighteen ninety-nine, before Arizona was even a state, as the Arizona Normal School in Flagstaff. Its original purpose was to train teachers for the territory's rural communities, and it opened with twenty-three students and two faculty members. Flagstaff's altitude, nearly seven thousand feet in the ponderosa pine forest at the base of the San Francisco Peaks, shaped the campus's identity from the start.

The school became a full university in nineteen sixty-six and today enrolls more than twenty-eight thousand students. It is perhaps best known outside academia for its forestry and environmental science programs, its Indigenous studies initiatives, and the High Altitude Sports and Wellness Center, which draws Olympic-level athletes for altitude training. The school sits not far from historic Route Sixty-Six.