Where are you likely to hear “State 48 near me”?

If you were standing right now at 37° north latitude and 109° 03' west longitude, you could put your foot in four states at once. Just like millions and millions of other visitors have. That’s the location, of course, of the famous Four Corners; the point on the map — and on the ground — where Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico meet.
 
Because of that completely unique configuration, you might think that’s the most likely space you might overhear someone talking on their cell, excitedly telling a friend “... state 48 near me!” And you might.
 
But that’s not the only place you could overhear that.
 
More on that in a minute.

Four states, one point

If you’ve never been to the Four Corners, or if you haven’t been since 2010, you haven’t seen the updated, more modern Four Corners Monument. It’s located on tribal land, Ute and Navajo, and it’s part of the Navajo Nation Parks and Recreation system. The monument itself was designed by the Navajo Nation Bureau of Land Management.
 
And for something with such a simple design, it’s pretty impressive — especially when you look at what’s on the ground and keep an image in your head of all the maps you’ve seen. Right there in front of you is the single point where all four of those big ol’ states come together: Utah (State 45), Colorado (State 38), New Mexico (State 47), and of course, the baby of the group, our beloved State 48.
 
Of course, the monument didn’t start out all that impressive. The first marker was a sandstone post, set in 1875. Other markers came and went as people backed over them with their mules or whatever. In 1931 a brass disc was set in concrete so the mules couldn’t hurt it. That was replaced with a nicer one in 1992 and surrounded with a mule-resistant raised concrete patio. And it was all rebuilt in 2010, though the disc didn’t change.
 
It’s really worth seeing, but if you want to visit, do a little homework first. The Navajo nation is being very COVID-careful, so they’re opening their parks at only 50-percent capacity as of this writing.
 
Of course, where we’re writing this from, if you were to overhear somebody say “state 48 near me,” chances are they’re not talking about standing in UT or NM or CO and looking over into our yard.

What’s the point of “State 48 near me”?

You know by now, if you’ve read even a few of the posts in this space, that we at State Forty Eight are passionate Arizonaphiles. Heck, we started a whole company to show which of the above-mentioned four corners we think is most important.
 
This means no disrespect to our neighbors at the monument, BTW. They’re very fine places with very fine people and very fine corners and we’re proud to have a point in common with them in the heart of the American Southwest.
 
(Of course, we could point out that, of the four, Arizona is the southwestiest, but that would be kinda childish and anyway it’s not really a contest, probably.)
 
So “state 48 near me” means something else where we are. So would “state 48 Phoenix,” if you heard that, because, well, we’re in Phoenix.
 
What it means here is you missed the first part of the sentence, which is probably something like “Where is a ….”
 
And we’ll be happy to answer that for you.

Why “State 48 Phoenix” is a thing

First, a little of our history: We knew from our start that we wouldn’t be able to turn State Forty Eight into one of those other Arizona-spanning mega-shopping-entities like, oh … Sears or J.C. Penney or K-Mart.
 
Hmmmm. Looks like it’s a good thing we didn’t try, huh?
 
So we let the interwebs do our state-spanning for us. And like your folks told you about your favorite puppy from when you were little that suddenly wasn’t around anymore, or about Santa, or about somebody else (but definitely not somebody creepy), we’re always right there with you — at statefortyeight.com.
 
But we know some of you like to go out to go clothes shopping; to actually see our stuff and touch it and — despite our very friendly and painless exchange policies when you order online — try it on. So when somebody like that calls or emails and asks “Where is a state 48 near me?”, we start through the list:
 
There are two official State Forty Eight stores; just us and our stuff. One of those is our headquarters store in Chandler. The other is our part of the wonderful communal experience called The Churchill in Phoenix. (If you want to know why it’s wonderful, go back to our June 28 post in this space.) 
 
Then we have some other retailers who share our love of our state and decided a good way to show that would be to carry our stuff, so they do. There are several of them, and we could be adding more even as we’re typing this, so rather than risk leaving somebody out, go to our site and pull down “Retailers.” The whole gang’ll be there.

Now you know!