The Glory Road

The Apache Trail in central Arizona has a little bit of everything that makes Arizona gorgeous: Tawny mountains. Canyons. Vast reaches of desert. Tinkling streams. Blue, blue lakes.

So it would follow that this is one of the most heavily-traveled, tourist-frequented, scenery-ogled roads in the West. Right?

Wrong!

It's not well-traveled at all. Oh, there are some cars on the Trail. And people. But not the cavalcades of cars nor crush of people you see swarming into and out of Grand Canyon and surging through Sedona and rolling along Interstate 40 past the Painted Desert.

In the first place, although it has an official designation (Arizona Route 88), the Apache Trail doesn't really go anywhere. You embark on it at Apache Junction, 33 miles east of Phoenix, almost at the hem of that familiar, hauntingly beautiful eminence known as Superstition Mountain. One travels in a lazy loop, past Canyon, Apache, and Roosevelt Lakes, painstakingly negotiating corkscrew turns and roller coaster hills. Although considered by most to be only that 44-mile section of Arizona Route 88 between Apache Junction east to Roosevelt Dam, for our purposes we'll think of the Apache Trail as running the entire 75 miles to its re-joining U.S. 60 between Miami and Globe. But you can get from Apache Junction to Globe via Route 60 in easily half the time.

Secondly, the Trail is not paved over its entire length. It's paved from Apache Junction to a little east of Tortilla Flat, then it's gravel - but well graded and well maintained gravel east to Roosevelt Dam. The stretch between the Dam and Route 60 is paved.

Why, then, if it's so darned beautiful, hasn't all of it been paved? Well, there was, for a while, some agitation to do precisely that. Reg Manning, cartoonist for Phoenix' Arizona Republic, campaigned for it back before World War II in his weekly cartoon panel feature “The Big Parade.” Manning says now he's not all that sorry he didn't succeed. “I guess it's all right as it is,” he says.

The official Arizona Department of Transportation explanation is that the Apache Trail is a “scenic and historical route,” and, says state highway engineer William N. Price, “we'd like to keep it that way.” Indeed, on May 21 of last year the Apache Trail was officially placed on the state register of historic places by Governor Raul H. Castro; Roosevelt Dam had previously been designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States government.

What it all comes to is a consensus that the Trail and its beauty are too precious to spoil with a superhighway, hordes of people, motels, and hot dog stands. Those who really appreciate what the Apache Trail has to offer are going to find it and endure it (not that so very much endurance is required). And when they do, they'll find as thousands already have that from the Trail can be seen Arizona in microcosm; along it are all the ingredients: a suggestion of the Grand Canyon in Whispering Horse Canyon, a reminder of Oak Creek Canyon's red rock in the awesome formations visible from Fish Creek Hill, and an evocation of vertically-sided Canyon de Chelly in the majestic Walls of Bronze. Here, in a word, is all of Arizona distilled into a few exciting, meandering miles.

The story of how the Apache Trail became an historic route begins with the advent of reclamation in the arid West.

In 1902, at the urging of President Theodore Roosevelt, Congress passed the National Reclamation Act, after which the Salt River Project was created to irrigate a great enclave of rich but thirsty desert land around and about the thenlittle town of Phoenix. Congress also anted up to build a dam, advancing funds to be paid back in part from the sale of hydroelectric power generated in the dam's powerplant. It would be one of America's first multi-purpose reclamation developments, establishing - as the Project likes to put it - “the principle that power is the paying partner of water.” John Gunther in his book Inside U.S.A. said, “[The Salt River Project] on which Phoenix rises from the desert that would otherwise be its ashes, is the most spectacular thing of its kind I have ever seen.”

Because the nearest railhead was 65 miles away, a road had to be built to haul construction equipment and materials to the damsite in huge high-wheeled wagons behind mule teams. This road, in itself a remarkable bit of engineering, was-and is the Apache Trail, although it wasn't called that until some time later.

Teddy Roosevelt traveled up the Trail on March 18, 1911, to dedicate the dam named for him. “I never realized until this morning,” he said in the course of his dedicatory speech, “what an extraordinary, beautiful and picturesque strip of country this is. I think that the drive from the beautiful city of Phoenix, especially the last few miles down that extraordinary gorge, is one of the most spectacular, best-worth-seeing sights in the world. And I hope our people will realize that I want to see them coming in by the tens of thousands here, just as they go to the Yosemite, to the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Park.” It's just as well that “T.R.” didn't get his way. It would have spoiled the very thing he admired so extravagantly.

For a fact, though, the Southern Pacific Railroad did its level best to fulfill President Roosevelt's wish and, in the process, make a buck or two for itself. It built Apache Lodge on the shore of Roosevelt Lake and for a while promoted it as a tourist attraction to compete with the Santa Fe's Grand Canyon tours. Travelers would get off the train at Globe and be taken by seven-passenger auto stages to the lake. In fact, it was Southern Pacific's imaginative advertising people who gave the road the name by which we know it today the Apache Trail.

George Wharton James, the famous writer on the Southwest, made the trip by car in 1915 and wrote, “No indifferent or careless chauffeur can take the wheel for such a trip, nor can he be a weakling or a coward. It requires vigilance almost every minute . . . ” It still does require vigilance, although, considering that modern cars have power steering and adequate brakes, one can be a weakling and even a little bit of a coward and still safely “do” the trail. Nevertheless, it would be well to look alive at places like Fish Creek Hill (which, incidentally, is where you'll see the great Walls of Bronze-gigantic reddish-brown cliffs smeared with green to give an exotic bronze effect). Here the road picks its way down the sheer face of a canyon, dropping 800 feet in a mile, along which are old-fashioned turnouts to let cars pass in opposite directions. One will feel a good deal more secure driving the grade of Fish Creek Hill eastward rather than westward, since that puts the vehicle nearest the canyon wall instead of on the lip overlooking the chasm.

The history that makes the Apache Trail so special extends back quite a bit beyond the days of Teddy Roosevelt, laboring mule teams, and the building of what is to this day the highest masonry dam on earth.

East of the Dam a few miles, for instance, you'll see a road cutting off to the north marked Young Road. It's also known among the locals as “Feud Turn-off.” The road - graded most of its length - will take the traveler, if he's hardy and venturous enough, into one of the most storied regions of the American Southwest: Pleasant Valley, north from Lake Roosevelt and on the other side of the well-forested Sierra Ancha range.

Here a bitter, ruinous range war was fought during the 1880s and 90s between two families, the Grahams and Tewks-burys. It was the old, old story: cattle versus sheep. The Tewksburys herded thousands of sheep down from the Mogol-lon Rim into the Graham's cattle lands in the valley, and the shooting began. It went on for five years, and everybody in Pleasant Valley either had to take sides in the vendetta or get out. The feud ended only when there weren't enough people left alive to fight. Both families virtually destroyed each other and two counties were bankrupted by the resultant lawsuits and trials. The only reminders Inviting places to explore and picnic abound along the Apache Trail. (Left) Picnicking beneath mesquite trees on the banks of Canyon Lake. (Below) Refreshing pools near the campground at Tortilla Flat. James Tallon

(Left) Canyon Lake on the Apache Trail.

Bill McKinney Fish Creek, a refreshing retreat, near the Apache Trail.

Belinda Rain (Below) Cholla cactus frame the Superstition Mountains, a favorite landmark.

Bill McKinney