TRUCKIN'

BY: Iver Peterson | Photographs by Terrence Moore

For some reason, the Model A Ford motor makes a strangely musical note: cheedle leedle teedle leedle. It’s a song that looped as our soundtrack for a five-day, 230-mile drive down the bony spine of Arizona, from ponderosa-pine forests in the north to desert saguaros in the south, almost all of it on backcountry dirt roads, and all of it in an ancient, often balky 1929 Ford pickup truck.

We knew that a light car with good road clearance, one that wouldn’t go very fast, was the perfect way to explore millions of acres of public lands away from the paved roads, away from the traffic and the comforts — and discomforts — of modern high-speed travel.

“Slow down and taste the dust” was our motto as we made our way over old logging roads, Forest Service fire roads, ranch trails … any rocky track leading south from the tiny Historic Route 66 town of Parks, near Williams, to Cave Creek, a remnant of old Arizona on the edge of Phoenix. We wanted to experience what travel was like in the first decades of Arizona’s statehood, when there were few paved roads beyond city limits, and when car travel was even more of an adventure. And we wanted to see the many beautiful, unspoiled places in the state that few people see anymore: deep, somber desert valleys guarded by shark-tooth peaks; forest meadows that open like parklands between stands of pines and scrub oaks; rivers and streams hedged with mesquite and acacia, their branches alive with the songs of wrens and meadowlarks.

And to add to the adventure, Terry Moore, who made the photographs, and I took along a couple of fourth-graders: Charlie, Terry’s son, and Charlie’s friend Nick. After all, taking the kids is part of the American travel story, and as every parent soon learns, it’s easier to travel with two kids than one.

Our Forest Service maps showed us our route, and my smartphone, with its GPS mapping system, showed us where we were from moment to moment: this is County Road 141, Forest Road 44 is coming up on the left, and ahead is the Round Mountain bike loop.

Our first side trip that day was a visit to Sycamore Point, where the road ends at a stupendous vista into Sycamore Canyon Wilderness, a deep roadless area where the shallow rivers sparkled over gravel bars in the sunlight far below us. We climbed down through forbidding outcrops of lumpy gray basalt to the haunting stillness of the Sinaguan Indian cliff dwellings below the rim. Their golden-red sandstone walls, carefully laid up centuries before, made a joke of our efforts at “time travel” in a vehicle not even a century old. The boys wanted to camp there, but we'd passed a “no camping” sign coming in, and we save our public lands and their precious historical artifacts by obeying the rules. Besides, you can camp just about anywhere else on public lands, so we pressed on to a wide meadow in the slanting evening sun called Pine Flat.

We kept the camping simple: a small tent for the boys and a tarp on the ground for the men. That night, we fought to stay awake under the sparkling dome of heaven, to catch the occasional shooting star and talk about our journey's promising start. But sleep overtook us, and our first day was done. We'd covered 38 miles.

The map may have said Pine Flat, but by the first gray light of the next day, I decided to rename it Cold Camp. Our fire was out, our sleeping bags were covered with heavy

We set out in early April from the general store in Parks, crossed over Interstate 40, with its blind rivers of steel speeding east and west, and headed south on the broad, smooth Garland Prairie section of the lower Kaibab National Forest. Up here the ponderosa is king, and it was a typical Northern Arizona spring day — warm in the sun, cool in the shade — as our little truck spun easily along the dusty roads toward the south, sometimes approaching the breathtaking speed of 35 miles per hour.

Our first side trip that day was a visit to Sycamore Point, where the road ends at a stupendous vista into Sycamore Canyon Wilderness, a deep roadless area where the shallow rivers sparkled over gravel bars in the sunlight far below us. We climbed down through forbidding outcrops of lumpy gray basalt to the haunting stillness of the Sinaguan Indian cliff dwellings below the rim. Their golden-red sandstone walls, carefully laid up centuries before, made a joke of our efforts at “time travel” in a vehicle not even a century old. The boys wanted to camp there, but we’d passed a “no camping” sign coming in, and we save our public lands and their precious historical artifacts by obeying the rules. Besides, you can camp just about anywhere else on public lands, so we pressed on to a wide meadow in the slanting evening sun called Pine Flat.

Now, in theory, the little Model A Ford motor is so simple that it’s easy to fix, but several hours of tinkering were fruitless, and we had to be towed into the town of Williams, barely a dozen miles from our starting place, at the end of a rope. Our travel day was over after only 6 miles of driving (and 14 miles of towing), but we counted ourselves lucky in finding Jim Walker and his son, J.P. — the resident old-car experts at Precision Auto. After a welcome night in a motel, we were back on the road the next day, Wednesday, a broken set of points replaced. As we headed south into Yavapai County, the bright sunlight of the day before was gone, replaced by threatening clouds and an occasional rattle of rain. Gone, too, were the wide, easy roads of the Kaibab. Now we were traveling on narrower and rockier but still easily passable trails. We were descending fast, already 3,000 feet below our starting point, and now, at 4,000 feet, we were tipping over the edge of the Mogollon Rim, which marks the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. Imperceptibly, we had left the ponderosas and were dropping into the valley of the Verde River and the high desert dotted by piñon pines and junipers.

In the cool weather, the boys retreated into a nest of sleeping bags in the back of our little red truck, where their 21st century portable video games were not quite in keeping with the early 20th century ethic we were hoping for.

WE CROSSED the Verde River over a handsome 1929 box truss bridge — listed on the National Register of Historic Places — at Perkinsville, and stopped to diagnose the ominous rattle that was coming from under the hood. The fan had worked its way loose and was chipping at the radiator, dangerously close to the cooling tubes. A fraction of an inch farther, and our trip would have been over. But we solved it with a common crescent wrench, a few spare washers and some elbow grease. Before us lay some of the most challenging road we would face, climbing back up to nearly 7,000 feet on the twisty trail around Woodchute Mountain, following the impossible bends of the old Bradshaw Mountain railroad right of way. We rolled into a campsite outside of Jerome, perched on the side of the mountain, just as the sun dropped below the rim of the earth.

Any thought that the road from 7,000 feet to 2,000 feet would be a straight downhill was put to rest on Thursday, when we found ourselves climbing up and down the stairways of Mingus Mountain, south of Jerome, and finally dropping down to Cherry, Powell Springs and a dirt track into Bloody Basin and the 71,000-acre Agua Fria National Monument. We were beginning to meet other vehicles on the dirt roads, a new experience after the isolation of the higher country, where we’d had the road to ourselves.

By now the truck was running strong and smooth, but it still took squirming to fit our legs through the little door, and to perch on the narrow seat. We Americans are inches taller, and a lot heavier, than we were when the truck was designed, after all. We managed with frequent stops for hikes and photography, however, and that night we camped on state land by the Agua Fria. The wind that blew all day had swept the night sky clean of clouds. We’d come 187 miles since Monday.

On the last day, Friday, we entered the Tonto National Forest, climbing out of the Agua Fria along the Copper Creek road. Now our path frequently narrowed to one lane, and the faint track painted in the dust by our narrow tires showed that we were once again alone on the road as we twisted along the crests of low hills, the inadequate brakes on the old Ford groaning and complaining with each steep drop. The landscape was changing rapidly, too, from scrub oaks and manzanitas to blooming globemallows and hedgehog cactuses.

By noon we were at Seven Springs, celebrated a century or more ago as a summer haven for Arizonans in the days before air conditioning. As we forded the river at Seven Springs, we saw our first saguaro cactus, and we knew that we’d at last arrived at the Sonoran Desert. A few miles later, we stopped for our last outing, an easy 1-mile hike up to the 900-year-old stone walls of the Sears Kay Hohokam Indian village outside of Cave Creek.

The dirt road ended at pavement, and lines of cars, impatient at our stately progress, muscled past us. We’d come 230 miles in five slow days, descended more than a mile to the desert floor, and seen and breathed the heartland of Arizona. We could have covered the same distance in a modern car in two and a half hours, but what memories would we have had then, and what stories to tell?