BACK ROAD ADVENTURE

Bonita to Klondyke

Billy the Kid followed this route when it was a bumpy, dusty mule track. It's still pretty dusty, but at least the gunfighters are all gone.

IN SOUTHEASTERN ARIZONA, near where Cochise and Graham counties meet, a great mountain dominates the landscape: Mount Graham, at 10,720 feet, the tallest peak in the Pinaleño Mountains. The range's southern flank nourishes a fertile plain with water and soil, a gently rolling prairie famous for its huge, delicious apples, less well known as the site of a greenhouse complex that stretches for miles, feeding North America and Europe with produce year-round. It's a busy place, buzzing with activity and the rumble of tractors, forklifts and semis, not far from the ever-growing towns of Willcox and Safford and heavily traveled Interstate 10.

The valley quiets down considerably a half-hour's drive north of the highway, where a dirt road to the hamlet of Klondyke meets pavement at Bonita. The Spanish name means "pretty," and it suits the large grove of stately cottonwood trees at the intersection, their yellow leaves fluttering like signal flags to mark the beginning of an autumn backroad adventure.

Bonita doesn't see much traffic these days, as its long-abandoned general store attests, but it once saw plenty Of rambunctious, rowdy action as a watering hole for cowboys working the ranches of the Sulphur Springs Valley and for soldiers at nearby Fort Grant. One of those cowboys was a young man named Billy Bonney, whom older cowhands called "the Kid," and who carved the first notch onhis pistol handle within eyesight of Bonita's beautiful trees.

Billy the Kid rode the road to Klondyke when it was a bumpy, dusty mule track. Modern travelers will find plenty of dust still, and perhaps a bump and bounce or two, but otherwise little discomfort on its descendant,

travel tips

Vehicle Requirements: Passenger car during fair weather Travel Advisory: Allow six hours for the loop trip. Aravaipa and Klondyke roads can be muddy, slippery and icy seasonally. Warning: Back-road travel can be hazardous, so beware of weather and road conditions. Carry plenty of water. Don't travel alone, and let someone know where you are going and when you plan to return. Information: Bureau of Land Management, 928-348-4400 Travelers in Arizona can visit az511.gov or dial 511 to get information on road closures, construction, delays, weather and more.

Aravaipa Road. Though warnings are posted that the road is "primitive," it's well enough maintained that an ordinary passenger vehicle can negotiate it without difficulty in good weather. The road winds across fine, rolling country studded with clumps of grama grass, sotol and creosote, climbing and descending to between 3,500 and 4,500 feet in elevation. Roughly a dozen miles from Bonita, a side road joins the main road. It leads to Eureka Springs, another favorite haunt of cowboys back in the day, now a privately owned ranch that backs onto the rippled Black Hills. Just a bit farther along, the main road turns to run parallel to Aravaipa Creek, its banks ablaze with cotton-woods in their fall splendor this time of year.

An hour's leisurely drive leads to the little hamlet of Klondyke, which officially boasts a population of five. The old general store, like that at Bonita, is closed, a for-sale sign beckoning the daring entrepreneur, and there's not a soul in sight. It's not officially a ghost town but Klondyke seems close to getting there. Nonetheless, there's no shortage of beauty here. Nor is there as the road winds below the foothills of the Santa Teresa Mountains, the next range to the west of the Pinaleños, growing a touch narrower as the broad Aravaipa Valley narrows, perceptibly, into a magnificent finale.

Aravaipa Road ends about 35 miles northwest of Bonita at the eastern gates of the spectacular Aravaipa Canyon, a rough and remote place that saw duty as the home to Arizona's last wild wolves before the reintroduction program of the late 1990s. The Nature Conservancy administers the canyon,

which carves its way through the supremely rugged Galiuro Mountains. The road is open to the public around the clock, but the Conservancy requires visitors entering the canyon beyond the road to do so only with a permit. Daytime vis-its are fine, though, and there's room alongside the tree-lined road for a picnic lunch sere-naded by the tuneful calls of tanagers, jays and cardinals and the less tuneful snorts of javelinas, piglike critters that are wary of humans but still curious about the snacks they carry. The canyon makes a lovely reward for having endured a snoot full of dust to get there, with its great forest of decid-uous trees brilliant in fall color and towering cliff walls that plunge hundreds of feet straight down, a scene more at home on the Colorado Plateau than down here where the Chihuahuan and Sonoran des-erts meet especially consid-ering that what greets the rock at canyon bottom is a wide stream of perennially flow-ing water. The Aravaipa Road offers two ways out. One is to return to Bonita and then the inter-state; the other is to follow the Klondyke Road, which joins Aravaipa Road about 7.5 miles southeast of Klondyke at an impossible-to-miss, well-signed intersection. That road runs 24 miles north-east to U.S. Route 70, which leads to Safford to the east and Globe to the west. It's a touch rougher than the Aravaipa Road in spots, climbing high up over a saddle between the Pinaleño and Santa Teresa ranges, affording impressive views of the rumpled, folded valley through which you've just passed.

Winding through hoodoo-haunted, juniper-studded, high-lonesome ranch land with seldom another car in sight, the Klondyke Road, like its cousin a thousand feet below, makes an inspiring getaway into country rich in beauty and history. ■ For more back-road adventures, pick up a copy of our book, The Back Roads. Now in its fifth edition, the book ($19.95) features 40 of the state's most scenic drives. To order a copy, call 800-543-5432 or visit arizonahighways.com. Al