Museum of Northern Arizona

The Museum of Northern Arizona was founded in 1928 by a group of Flagstaff citizens to protect and preserve the natural and cultural heritage of northern Arizona, and it is still a private, non-profit institution, accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Its exhibit building, made of malpais, the local lava rock, was built during the Depression, opened in the spring of 1936 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1993. It stands on a 200-acre campus at the foot of the San Francisco Peaks, beside US 180, the road to the Grand Canyon.

The permanent galleries cover the Colorado Plateau from several sides: the Native peoples of the plateau, archaeology, a pottery gallery called Histories in Clay, Southwestern jewelry, geology and the plateau's life zones. The Geology Gallery has a cast skeleton of Dilophosaurus wetherilli, a meat-eating dinosaur that lived in northern Arizona about 200 million years ago, and beside it a smaller model of Scutellosaurus lawleri, one of the earliest known armored dinosaurs. Fossil footprints from the Moenkopi Formation, about 240 million years old, are shown in the courtyard and the gallery, including a trackway that a heavy-equipment operator found in November 2020 at a construction site a couple of miles down the road. A Hopi katsina doll installation, opened in January 2026 and chosen in consultation with Hopi cultural leaders, rotates every six months. Exhibitions on view in November 2026 included Wagon Road to Mother Road, about the route that became Route 66, which turns 100 on November 11, 2026.

Behind the exhibits is a research collection of more than five million Native American artifacts, natural science specimens and works of fine art, kept in the Easton Collection Center, dedicated in 2009. The museum runs occasional behind-the-scenes tours of the collections. The campus also includes the McMillan Homestead, built in 1886 by Thomas Forsythe McMillan and long considered the oldest remaining Anglo-American residence in Flagstaff, and an 1880s log potato barn. Gardens and trails are open to visitors, but much of the campus north of the highway is working space, and the museum asks visitors to respect that.

Each summer the museum holds the Heritage Festival of Arts and Culture, a Native American art market with dances and music; in 2026 it ran June 26 to 28. The shop sells Native American art and jewelry, but the museum never sells items from its permanent collections. Only trained service dogs are allowed inside, not emotional support animals.