ALONG THE WAY

Take the Safe Route to the Confluence of Two Scenic Rivers

TIME IS A BENEVOLENT HEALER. Now that I am no longer staring into a gorge that could have become my final resting place, I can see my journey to the confluence of the Blue and San Francisco rivers without breaking out in a cold sweat. Thanks to the passage of time, fear has become a mere footnote in a fading memory. Now I find I can comfortably say to my friends, “This is a good weekend excursion” — which it is — while acknowledging my brush with death in a very deep canyon.

The San Francisco River bubbles out of the ground near Alpine and south of a big mountain called Escudilla in some of the state's most scenic country. Then the river slides downhill through the steep canyons of the Blue Range Primitive Area on Arizona's border with New Mexico, eventually joining the Blue River near the copper-mining town of Clifton. If you take the trip, do so in a fourwheel-drive vehicle. You won't need fourwheel drive for most of the way, but you will need it eventually.

I always hoped to see the San Francisco-Blue confluence, in part because I'd crisscrossed both rivers for many years and had heard about the spot so many times that it had taken on mythical proportions in my imagination. For me, seeing the rivers glide together at the base of a towering cliff would be like finishing a good book. That's what I thought.

Photographer Randy Prentice and I met Jay Rasco and Hal Herbert, who operate the Safford-based J Train Tours using a yellow sandrail that Rasco manufactured. It looks a little like a lunar lander with knobby tires. Rasco and Herbert towed the sandrail 50 miles northeast of Safford to Forest Service Road 212, a dirt track off State Route 78, also known as Mule Creek Road.

Boarding the sandrail after 7.5 miles on the level beginning of the forest road, we began a steep ascent of Dix Mesa through juniper and oak stands. This is where you need four-wheel