Everything you need to know about Camp Verde can be learned by driving Salt Mine Road. It highlights the town’s rural character and provides multiple history lessons and delicious scenery. Most significantly, it accentuates the life-altering dynamics that exist where desert and riparian habitats collide.
The road to Point of Pines Lake (Indian Road 8) plucks travelers from brushy desert and leads into a countryside that’s cracked open and wide. The road winds through shimmering grasslands, where horizons spread out and rough hills prop up a sky of epic proportions. Elk and pronghorns graze the high meadows, and Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep clamber up impossible cliffs. Black bears prowl the woodlands, and eagles, herons and ospreys fish the waters of faraway lakes ringed by ponderosa pines.
A former mining camp on the eastern flanks of the Santa Rita Mountains, Kentucky Camp makes a pleasant destination for an afternoon drive from Tucson. Most of the drive to the heritage site in the Coronado National Forest winds along the high-desert grasslands of scenic State Route 83, passing a winery and a historic ranch before turning off for the last 6 miles onto a gravel road.
Relationships are funny things. To make them work, you have to compromise. The same rule can be applied to scenic drives. Some scenic drives, anyway. Queen Valley Road in the Superstition Mountains is a good example. If you’re like my driving companion, Jon, who loves the adrenaline rush that comes from plowing across boulder-strewn terrain, then you’ll love the second half of this drive. It requires four-wheel-drive, which makes me nervous, because all I can think about in those scenarios is driving off a cliff.
The drive from Green Valley to Vail, with a side trip into Madera Canyon, winds into and around the Santa Rita Mountains of Southern Arizona. Inhabited for thousands of years and rich in lumber and mineral deposits, the area is as alive with history as it is famed for its biodiversity. Pack a lunch and plan a full day to enjoy all this drive has to offer.
If you’ve never driven down Interstate 19, which runs from Tucson to Nogales, you might not know that the distances on signs along that highway are in kilometers, rather than miles. You also might not know the highway passes some rugged and visually striking terrain. Ruby Road, which runs for 35 miles (that’s 56 kilometers) from I-19 to Arivaca, is a prime example.
For tourists and locals alike, the word “forest” usually conjures trees, not a stand of saguaro cactuses covered in spines. But candelabra-shaped saguaros, found exclusively in our Sonoran Desert, are classified as arborescent (tree-like), so the “forest” label is hardly a stretch. Nomenclature aside, Tucson’s cactus forest — tucked within Saguaro National Park East and nestled up against the Rincon Mountains — is as starkly beautiful as any primeval forest you’ve ever seen or imagined.
Sometimes, big things really do come in small packages. And big scenery often comes on little roads. State Route 266 is one of the shortest state highways in Arizona — with just under 20 miles of pavement cutting across the rugged rangeland south of Safford — but every mile dishes up dramatic vistas as the road rambles westward along the fringe of the Pinaleño Mountains, making this quick journey a big one for memories.
There’s a reason John Wayne once described Monument Valley as “the place where God put the West.” The landscape unfolds and extends until it touches the horizon, then massive monoliths erupt from the red clay. There’s nothing like it — sky and Earth come together to create this sacred place — and there’s no better way to see it than along Valley Drive.
Sycamore Canyon is Arizona’s second-largest gorge — second only to the natural wonder that can be seen from outer space. The attributes of the Grand Canyon are many, but the state’s runner-up has a few of its own, including the 13-mile drive to reach it. It’s a picturesque route through the Kaibab National Forest that gets less traffic than a Sonoran Desert highway in the dead of summer.
