ALONG THE WAY

adventure backroad POINT OF PINES Offers Campers a Glimpse of INDIAN HISTORY and Unspoiled Scenery

A FULL MOON HANGS IN LATE SEPTEMBER'S crisp air. The deserts remain warm, but up here, at about 6,400 feet on the Natanes Plateau, fall has unmistakably arrived. I can tell by the chorus of elk bugling in the pines outside my camp. road, and although you can negotiate the whole route with an ordinary sedan, a high-clearance vehicle is advisable if you plan to camp. The road through the Point of Pines picnic area and campground is sometimes muddy and badly rutted.

I'm at the southwestern edge of Point of Pines Lake in a small meadow surrounded by the remnants of late summer wildflowers and a deep forest of ponderosa pine trees. Earlier this evening, I had headed over to the lake and watched a great blue heron moon-walking near the opposite bank. A sign nearby warned, "Bears in the Area," but all I heard after the sun went down was the high-pitched call of a bull elk looking for love.

Point of Pines, a high-country recreational area, sits within the borders of the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Created by Congress in 1897, the reservation covers a little more than 1.8 million acres in central and eastern Arizona and was formerly a division of the White Mountain Reservation established in 1871.

The tribal headquarters at San Carlos lies roughly 110 miles east of Phoenix and the same number of miles northeast of Tucson, but the distance from each city to Point of Pines is around 178 miles. All but 3 miles of that trip is on paved roads. The last few miles are gravel The morning after my arrival, I took my kayak over to the mile-long Point of Pines Lake. I paddled down the middle, scanning the steep embankment on the southern shore.

From the high-water mark stained in the rocks, I could see how much the lake had dropped during the recent long drought. While I was lost in a reverie of missing rain, two great blue herons suddenly rose from a shadow at the edge of my peripheral vision. One swung over my head, arching through a small circle of the sky; the second one banked and moved wider, but both landed in the same pine tree, folding their smoky wings and becoming invisible against the backdrop of the forest.

A little after 4 P.M., I walked back to the lake from my campsite expecting to get a closer look at large herons. I was startled by what appeared to be a bald eagle perched on a bare branch at the top of a ponderosa pine on the opposite bank. An Apache man who had been watching his wife fish pointed at the top of the tree.

"Eagle," he said.

"I think so," I replied.

"Maybe a hawk," he said.

His young son dashed through the grass shouting, "Eagle, ma! Eagle, ma!"

Ma looked at the boy as if to say, "Yes, and there goes any chance I had of catching a fish with all that noise."

But, it turned out not to be an eagle. When it moved, I saw its white belly and a line of black feathers extending from its eye to the back of its head, the unmistakable markings of an osprey. Ospreys migrate through the area in the fall, and this one was clearly attracted by the prospect of dining on fish from Point of Pines Lake. It sat on that bare branch for roughly 15 minutes, and then swooped eastward, giving us a good view of its nearly 6-foot wingspread.

"Beautiful," remarked the Apache man.

"Yup," I said. We were nothing if not articulate.

Getting to this country up around Point of Pines is easy. To begin from Phoenix, take U.S. Route 60, the Superstition Freeway, east