The High Life

LIVING IN PARADISE ISN'T EASY. IF IT WERE, EVERYONE WOULD live in the White Mountains, a place that combines stunning natural beauty, water, wide-open spaces, cold winters, busy summers, and a connection to the land that’s deep and abiding.

The White Mountains of Eastern Arizona rise like a hunched back at the southern end of the Mogollon Rim. Actually, it’s more like a region of high ground than a mountain range. Still, two mountains do protrude like a pair of shoulder blades. Mount Baldy, with an elevation of about 11,400 feet, ranks as the second-highest peak in Arizona (second to Humphreys Peak near Flagstaff), and it’s the spiritual and emotional core of the area for the White Mountain Apaches. Nearby Escudilla Mountain, elevation 10,912 feet, stands about 30 miles east of Mount Baldy, and is among the top five highest peaks in the state. Both are magnets for moisture — while Arizona averages less than 12 inches of rain annually, some areas in the White Mountains get more than 36 inches a year.

Every winter, moisture gathers in heaps of snow. In the spring, it melts and flows to the rest of the state via rivers and creeks with names like the Little Colorado, the Black, the Blue, the White, the Silver and the Salt.

The Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests comprise much of the region. The western and southern edges lie within the White Mountain Apache Reservation. Several communities dot the White Mountains area landscape: Alpine, Eagar, Greer, Hannagan Meadow, Heber, Lakeside, McNary, Nutrioso, Overgaard, Pinetop, Show Low, Snowflake, Springerville, St. Johns and Vernon. A tally of 2000 census figures put the population of the White Mountains at approximately 32,000.
 

A Man Who Loves to Fish
Chip Chipman and his wife, Penny, have lived in Nutrioso since 1997, when Chip retired after 20 years of teaching special education at Fowler Elementary School in Phoenix. “We were looking for a house with a good barn for the horses,” Chip says. “We bought it in 1995, and moved here when I retired. We’ve lived here ever since.” 

The town of Nutrioso, according to Penny, “has 230 full-time residents, and 500 during the summer months.” She smiles as she describes it as “a bedroom community for Springerville.”

Penny, a retired nurse, is originally from upstate New York. Chip comes from Maine and three generations of lobster fishermen, and there’s still a hint of New England in his voice after all these years in the West.

Chip is a gentle, patient man with an infectious smile. Friends convinced him to try the fishing-guide business, and over the years, that business has grown with his renown. He’s been featured on television, and his fishing columns are popular throughout Arizona and New Mexico.

“Guiding comes in bunches,” Chip explains. He stays busy from first thaw until late fall. When the streams start to freeze and the guiding business dwindles, he and Penny like to go on cruises. When they get back to Nutrioso, Chip serves as the director of fly-fishing at the Greer Lodge. He also guides and conducts fly-casting lessons through his business, Arizona Mountain Fly Fishing. This is a man who loves to fish, and if you want to find him, chances are he’s hip-deep in the East Fork of the Black River, getting ready to land another one.
 

Her Grandmother Was Mollie Butler
The South Fork of the Little Colorado River flows through the MLY Ranch in a low canyon that’s barely visible south of State Route 260 between Greer and Eagar. 

Sug Peters runs the ranch with her husband, Bobby. Her father started calling her Sugar when she was young. “I didn’t know I had another name until I went to school,” she says. Her parents were Vince and Helen Butler, and her grandmother was Mollie Butler. The Molly Butler Lodge in Greer opened its doors in 1910, when Mollie and her husband, John, welcomed hunters and fishermen who wanted to tap into John’s skills as a guide. The lodge is still in business.

Other than her time away at school, Sug has lived in the area her entire life. She attended a one-room schoolhouse in Greer. “I wasn’t old enough to go, but in the state of Arizona, you have to have seven kids to keep the public school open, and they only had six.”

Her parents sent her to live with “Grandma,” Mollie Butler, in Greer. “I was in first grade and my cousin Dick was in eighth grade,” she says. “We rode this little old white horse named Speck from Grandma’s up to the schoolhouse. We’d get on him and ride him bareback to the school, and then we’d turn him loose and he’d go home back to Grandma’s house — right in front of the lodge there was horse pasture. Then we’d walk home after school.”

Sug married Bobby in 1972. “It was love at first sight,” she remembers. “We both loved the outdoors, loved to hunt. That was a really wet year. It rained and rained and rained and rained, and one day the rain turned to snow, and big flakes came down and the snow built up and by October 31 or so, there was 4 feet of snow on the level at the Alpine Divide. We’d been deer hunting every day. The snow was too deep to hunt, so we said, ‘Well, we’ll go get married.’ ”

They have four daughters and four grandchildren. Bobby is a contractor during the week and a musician on the weekends. Sug retired from teaching kindergarten in Springerville after 25 years, and stays busy running nearly 100 head of cattle on their ranch and managing two cabins, which they rent to people who want to get away from it all. The older of the two cabins was built in the 1870s.

Sug and Bobby are typical of the folks who live in the White Mountains. Through Bobby’s contracting business, they benefit from development, but they also see the impact it has on the land they cherish.

Sug explains: “When I was kid and lived on the mountain with my dad in a cow camp, we could be there for days and maybe see the sheepherders way off, or the Apache cowboys would come over because some of their cattle was on us, or we’d go over to their camp and get our cattle.” Otherwise, the mountains were vacant.

“I guess, unfortunately, I grew up thinking we owned the whole world. It was our place and our responsibility. My dad was the best caretaker the world ever had. He was awarded several times — cattleman of the year — for the way he looked at the land, and the long term, and how things need to be and how you could protect them. I guess I soaked up too much of it.”
 

“I Had a Blessed Childhood”
The Sipe White Mountain Wildlife Area makes up a piece of the White Mountains’ “promised land.” Brenda Crawford lives there with her husband, Brian, an employee of the Arizona Game and Fish Department. He’s also the manager at Sipe. Her parents, Norm and Peg Mead, spent their honeymoon in the White Mountains in 1947. The newlyweds settled in Mesa, but were determined to find a way to make the White Mountains their home away from home. In 1954, they launched a visitors guide to the area called Arizona’s White Mountains.

“My parents had no idea how to begin, but they were young and optimistic,” Brenda says. “That first issue had so many mistakes, a local English teacher held a contest for her students to see who could find the most errors.” The guide improved dramatically the second year, and continues to be one of the best publications focusing on the White Mountains. 

“I had a blessed childhood,” Brenda says. “We spent every summer up here selling advertising and going on excursions for stories.” Even today, Brenda still writes stories and sells advertising for the guide, and her father and brother continue to publish it.
 

Order the Meatloaf
The “meatloaf axiom” is applicable even in the White Mountains. Simply stated: “If a restaurant has the nerve to put meatloaf on its menu, the discerning diner is obliged to try it.” When Pauline Merrill, the owner of the Rendezvous Diner in Greer, puts meatloaf on her menu, the diner definitely isn’t disappointed. Like everything else she serves at her rustic little restaurant, the meatloaf is homemade and delicious.

Pauline was born in Springerville and graduated from Round Valley High School. She first came to Greer in 1982. “When I was in high school,” she recalls, “I’d come here and work as a server at the Molly Butler Lodge.” She continued to work as a server until about six years ago, when she seized the opportunity to buy a diner of her own.

“I don’t need tons and tons of money in order to be happy,” she says. “As long as I can pay my bills and live in Greer, and I’m able to provide the people who work with me a decent living, [that’s all I need]. I know what it’s like to be on the other end of the line where you’re a server making 10 bucks in tips per day, and you still have rent to pay and you’re raising kids.

“The best thing about living in Greer is the beauty of it,” she says, as her faces lights up. “I wake up every day — I live on the side of the mountain — and every day is like ahhh. There’s not a day goes by that isn’t incredibly beautiful. I’ve been out here for more than 20 years, and it never ceases to amaze me.”
 

Tom Carpenter lives in Flagstaff. He understands high-altitude living, and he’d move even higher if he could. 

David Zickl lives in the desert community of Fountain Hills, so standing in the icy waters of a high mountain stream was a cool, refreshing shock to his system.