Arizona's Grand Old Movie Houses

THE FORT APACHE INDIAN RESERVATION

When summer arrives, few places have more appeal than the cool green highlands of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. High above the heat and hustle of Arizona's desert cities, this near-wilderness home of the White Mountain Apache Tribe contains 1.6 million acres of forests, mountains, and meadows in eastern Arizona. Sunrise, the tribe-operated ski resort near Mount Baldy, is the region's wintertime jewel; but when the weather is warm, the shady stands of ponderosa pines, the 26 lakes, and 300 miles of trout streams beckon irresistibly. Here flatland Arizonans fleeing 110° heat find daytime temperatures in the 70s and evenings that call for a sweater.

Among the refugees are my friend Pam Ryan and I. We head eastward from Phoenix on U.S. Route 60 and, once beyond Globe, we climb onto the broad, rolling Natanes Plateau. Recent rains have turned the grass deep green and called the wildflowers to life. The verdant landscape offers a striking contrast to the austere low desert we have left just hours earlier.

A sign tells us we are entering the San Carlos Indian Reservation. San Carlos was separated from the Fort Apache reservation in 1872. Initially the two preserves formed a single White River Indian Reservation, created by executive order on November 9, 1871.

Abruptly, the Salt River Canyon drops before us. We veer across the highway to a turnout and walk over to the edge. Below, the road skitters through a five-mile descent, angling down 2,000-foot cliffs to the roaring river.

First unexpected sylvan fields, and now this, an improbable miniversion of the Grand Canyon: we are stunned.

The overlook is Hieroglyphic Point, named for thousand-year-old petroglyphs pecked in the volcanic blocks near the base of some steps. The curious drawings are unmarked and unprotected. More recent “artists” have added to them, unfortunately. Who would imagine that the Salt River, dammed to extinction before it reaches Phoenix, could have carved this majestic gorge? The spired cliffs layer on chromatic layer of Precambrian and Paleozoic limestone in shades of mahogany, rust-red, ochre and, at top, rosey buff - rise like cathedral walls from the canyon floor. What must the first men who saw it have thought?

Mainly they seem to have noticed the water's brackish taste, drawn from the salt deposits along Salt River Draw, where King S. Woolsey operated a salt mine in the late 1870s. The Pima Indians called it a'kimûlt, and in 1698 Spanish missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino named it Rio Salado. Both terms mean “Salt River.” Once we cross the bridge just above water level, we're on the Fort Apache reservation. The road climbs five miles through cinnamon-red rocks to the grassy plateau. On this side of the river, the ground is overrun with wildflowers. Sunflowers, wild buckwheat, ragweed, and goldenweed spread in luminous expanses up the hills and across the meadows. Coralcolored globe-mallow and the huge white blossoms of sacred datura are blooming everywhere.

We turn off the main road at Carrizo, cruising toward Cedar Creek on State Route 73, where the road cuts through earth as red as Oak Creek Canyon's famed terra cotta buttes. No one is around. Not a single car passes us as we make our way down the narrow pavement.

“My husband would die if he knew I was doing this,” Pam reflects. I am silently glad the tires on the truck are new; I wouldn't relish having to jack it up out here. But oh, the country is beautiful, the chaparral lush against rusty Sugarloaf, Silver Butte, and Sawtooth Mountain. Near Canyon Day Flat we pass through irrigated bottomland, startling in its emerald green. Then into Whiteriver. Here we find people-young and old, and lots of children. Collectively, they are handsome: tall and stocky, with shimmering black hair so shiny it seems to take on bluish highlights in the sun.

Whiteriver has an airport: a grass strip with a complex of metal buildings next to which several tiny planes are parked. “I wouldn't go up in one of those if my life depended on it,” I remark.

“Not a chance!” Pam agrees.

Marjorie Grimes, community relations director for Tribal Chairman Reno Johnson, has invited us to visit her in Whiteriver. We seek her out at her office, not far from the tribally owned Fort Apache Timber Company.

(RIGHT) Linda Kay Lupe, a White Mountain Apache, was Miss Indian America in 1988.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) Whiteriver, the tribal capital, seen from Sevenmile Rim, near the site of an 1881 Apache massacre of Mormon settlers. The village of Sevenmile is in the foreground.

fishermen catch huge catfish.” Those ugly scavengers, she adds, do not suit Apache taste.

“Chairman Johnson would like to meet you,” she says, “but he's booked up today. Come to breakfast with us tomorrow, and we'll show you around.” We arrive at the White Mountain Apache Motel and Restaurant at 8:00 A.M. to find the chairman has already been at work for an hour. Johnson is a big, charismatic man, a natural politician whose sincerity Company's large sawmill.

Margie, who started the first women's forest fire-fighting crew, likes to fourwheel-drive the dirt roads around the reservation: note, however, that all-terrain vehicles are prohibited here. She also enjoys fishing. “You can catch the most delicious smallmouth bass on the Black River,” she says. “You need a special permit, and you have to follow a fourwheel-drive road. At the Salt River waterfall above the bridge, we've seen white

FORT APACHE

Makes you wish he'd run for president. "When I took office two years ago," he says over coffee, "the tribe was about $20 million in debt." Trained as a law enforcement officer, Johnson established a new administrative hierarchy and arranged with creditors to consolidate and pay off the debts. "In 1986 and 1987, we made moneyafter we paid all the bills, we made about a million dollars. Already we have reduced the deficit considerably.

The White Mountain tribe has nine enterprises, we learn, ranging from the profitable ski resort and timber company to agricultural and commercial ventures. Recently, the tribe landed a $250,000 annual contract with McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Co. to manufacture insulation materials for the Army's twin-engine Apache helicopter. In Whiteriver, the timber company's sawmill turns out about 100 million board feet of lumber each year. Education is a high priority. To help college students stay in school, the tribe provides a summer internship program that attempts to place youngsters in jobs compatible with their fields of study. At that point, Margie Grimes notifies us the arrangements for our tour are ready. "The pilot's waiting for us," she says. Pilot? Chairman Johnson has scheduled a plane and proposes that Margie, Pam, and I spend the morning seeing the reservation from aloft.

FORT APACHE

I glance at Pam. She shows no sign of concern, other than a barely raised, quizzical eyebrow. Will her husband sue my estate, I wonder, if we're both immolated on Mount Baldy?

"O.K.," I hear myself saying. "Let's go." Minutes later, we're strapped into the cabin of a fire-lookout aircraft. Margie's husband, Richard, and Faith Beatty ride with us. We bump down the grass runway past a patch of wildflowers and slip the surly bonds of earth.

We fly over Kinishba Ruins, the home between A.D. 1100 and 1300 of perhaps 2,000 Mogollon people, and then the villages of Cedar Creek (about 1,700 residents) and Carrizo (300 to 500). Margie tells our pilot, Dominick (Berto) McCutcheon, that she'd like to visit some cliff dwellings above Canyon Creek. Berto has never seen the ruins and does not know how to find them, but Margie directs him by dead reckoning. We pass Blue House Mountain near Canyon Creek. "You can only see them from a certain angle," she says. The plane soars along a ridge and there, huddled beneath the ledges near the top, are a series of rock and adobe cliff houses. Probably because of their remoteness, they look relatively undamaged, as though the only depredations have come from wind and rain. Margie and Richard say that getting to them requires a long backpacking expedition after a trip over four-wheel-drive roads-and, yes, looters have already been there.

A long, gentle bank takes us to Chediski Ridge. At its top is the sacred Pumpkin Lake. Perfectly round, the lake is ringed with water lilies. "The ancestors thought the huge blooms looked like pumpkins," says Margie. "The water is always fresh. It's used in healing ceremonies."

A bare scar along Salt Creek Ridge testifies to a forest fire. "About 1,300 or 1,400 acres burned here last July," Margie says. "The fire was started by lightning."

We cross over Cibecue, a fairly extensive settlement containing more tribal offices, another sawmill, and a school. A new shopping center is going in here, with a grocery store and retail space. At Cibecue in 1881, Col. Eugene Asa Carr engaged 300 Coyotero Apaches after he arrested medicine man Nock-aye-de-Klinney. Ten soldiers, Capt. Edmund C. Hentig, and the Indian leader were killed, and 47 Apaches were captured. Three scouts deemed traitorous were hanged and two others sent to Alcatraz.

"Follow Cibecue Creek until just before it hits the Salt River," Margie directs our pilot. He obligingly turns down the steep canyon the stream has carved in the limestone. We spot another cliff house by the creek, and then, just above the junction with the Salt, three great waterfalls

Highland Splendor

The montane forests and plateau grasslands of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation contrast dramatically with Arizona's low deserts, exerting a powerful appeal to summer visitors. Here, yellow daisies line the bank of Bootleg Lake.

FORT APACHE

Continued from page 22 tumbling in a row. "You can hike up in there," Margie says. "They're spectacular from the ground."

We swing back over Whiteriver and Hon Dah, the northern gateway to the reser vation, where a motel is being enlarged and improved. Above the Hawley Lake bridge on Williams Creek, Margie points out another large, handsome waterfall. "It's across from Little Bear, that meadow there you park by the road near the bridge and hike in about a quarter mile." From the air, it looks like a small Niagara. "There's another one that goes with it," she adds, "like a spring coming out of the mountain."

Hawley Lake, set like a turquoise gem stone beneath McKay's Peak, forms the centerpiece for a vacation-home commu nity that for many years provided refuge for summer-weary desert dwellers. A previous tribal administration decided not to renew leases to the land on which the homes stand. Although Chairman Johnson hopes to effect a reconciliation with the remaining owners, many have already abandoned or moved their cabins.

East-southeast of Hawley Lake, we pass over Christmas Tree Lake at the edge of the Mount Baldy Wilderness. Once each year fishermen may angle for the rare Salmo Apache trout in this lake.

Herds of elk often roam the cienegas between thick stands of pine and aspen. We watch the clearings as we approach Mount Baldy, but on this trip the elk fail to appear.

"Mount Baldy is where our people go to worship," Margie explains. "There's a trail from State Route 273 near Sunrise to the top."

Covered with pine and aspen forest right up to the timberline, Mount Baldy rises to an imposing peak. In 1873, Capt. George M. Wheeler, surveying the Amer ican West for the U. S. Army, established a camp here. He called the mountain Thomas Peak after Brig. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas. The view from the summit was, he wrote, "the most magnificent and effective of any. Outstretched before us lay the tributaries of seven principal streams...four main mountain peaks... valley lands far surpassing any I have seen before. Mountain, forest, valley, and stream are blended in one harmonious whole. As we head back to Whiteriver after an hour and a half in the air, Margie urges us to visit Fort Apache, Kinishba, and the lake country near Mount Baldy. We take her up on this: Wheeler's harmonious whole, while easily grasped from the sky, can best be appreciated on foot.

Kinishba, an 800to 900-year-old pueblo ruin about six miles southwest of Whiteriver off State Route 73, stands in the middle of a field. From a distance, it is a stately old place. As we draw closer, we see it is fenced off with barbed wire. Its unmortared stone walls reach three stories high and cloister a central court yard where an old walnut tree grows. A weathered, almost illegible sign announ ces "Kinishba Ruins closed to public entry until [sic] stabilization completed.

Stabilization has a long way to go. Some of the walls have been clumsily rebuilt, and a failed attempt at roofing has col lapsed, dumping concrete, steel pipe, and wire into the compound. "I have to admit,"

says my sidekick, “it was more impressive from the air.” The ruin is unsafe for further exploration, and besides, the spirits here have been disturbed too much. We decide to double back to Fort Apache.

The first military installation in the White Mountains, Fort Apache was founded in 1870 as Camp Ord. When in 1874 Martha Summerhayes, an infantry officer's wife, arrived at this pretty streamside site after a difficult 500-mile wagon trip from Fort Mojave on the Colorado River, it was still called Camp Apache. “It was altogether picturesque and attractive,” she wrote in her memoir, Vanished Arizona. “In addition to row on row of log cabins, there were enormous stables and Government buildings, and a sutler's store.... We were assigned a half of a log cabin, which gave us one room, a small square hall, and a bare shed, the latter detached from the house, to be used for a kitchen.” A few shored-up cabins survive. A small museum, containing remnants of a large collection most of which burned in 1985, occupies Brig. Gen. George Crook's headquarters; and here we learn that the cliff dwellings date from A.D. 200 to 400 and were built by the Mogollon people. The old post now hosts the Theodore Roosevelt School, operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

In the museum's back office, we find Bonnie Lavender teaching beadwork to Anne Skidmore. Bonnie, a woman of quiet bearing and grace, transcribes tapes for curator Edgar Perry, who has spent his life collecting traditional stories. “Right now I'm doing ceremonial and leisure songs,” she says. She pulls out a thick folder of typewritten pages, all in Apache with interlineal, word-for-word English translations. The language looks incredibly difficult, the word order more convoluted than German.

Work on a new museum has been stalled, Bonnie says, by lack of money. The tribe obtained $30,000 in outside funding, and Harvard and the University of Arizona have joined the effort. But much irreplace able material was lost in the fire, which gutted the old barracks the original museum occupied.

As we leave, we hear a man chanting in Apache on the radio. “He is singing about the beauty of the Apache land,” Bonnie says.

Pam and I head up to Hawley Lake via

Indian routes 55, 30, and 26. The pine, spruce, and aspen forests grow more impressive the farther the well-maintained dirt road leads, and when we stop in a shady bosque by a crystalline stream, we find wild iris, larkspur, penstemon, purple thistle, and the blue daisy-like blossoms of fleabane. Wild grape climbs up a ponderosa's trunk, and strawberry patches cover the ground. In a cathedral-like clearing, with the sun shining down in beatific rays and the river rushing over water-polished rocks, the essential truth strikes us: this land's value surpasses price. It is a place that might well inspire a man to song.

WHEN YOU GO... Land of the White Mountain Apaches

Please remember that you are a guest on the reservation. Obey the laws and purchase the required permits; violators are cited. Use caution on dirt roads. Some are rough after rain or snowmelt, and many are poorly marked. For road conditions, call the White Mountain Apache Game and Fish Department (address and telephone numbers below). Bring a sweater or light jacket for summer evenings; in cooler weather, pack plenty of warm clothing. Recommended touring season is May through September.

Getting there: From Phoenix, take U.S. 6089; follow U.S. 60 from Florence Junction through Globe, where it joins State Route 77 and turns northeast. From Carrizo, State 73 will take you to Fort Apache, Whiteriver, Hon Dah, Pinetop-Lakeside, and Show Low. Or take State 87 to Payson, then State 260 to Show Low, PinetopLakeside, and Hon Dah, where you can pick up State 73. From Tucson, take U.S. 89 north to Oracle Junction and turn onto State 77. From Flagstaff, follow Interstate 40 to Holbrook and turn south on State 77.

Accommodations: Motels and restaurants in Whiteriver and Hon Dah, run by the White Mountain Apache Tribe, welcome visitors and provide much-needed jobs for tribal members. Pinetop-Lakeside has two dozen resorts and motels and a youth hostel, plus several excellent restaurants. At Greer, you'll find another 15 hostelries; Show Low has a dozen more plus an R.V. park. East of Show Low on U.S. 60, Springerville and adjacent Eagar have several motels and a KOA campground. The reservation has more than 1,000 campsites. Favorite spots include Little and Big Bonito creeks, the East Fork of the White River, and Pacheta, Drift Fence, and Reservation lakes (all east of Whiteriver); Diamond Creek, the North Fork of the White River, and Bootleg and Cooley lakes (north of Whiteriver). The required permits can be obtained through the White Mountain Apache Game and Fish Department or at stores in Whiteriver, Carrizo, Hon Dah, Hawley Lake, A-1 Lake, and Sunrise Lake.

What to see and do: Rodeo, a favorite pastime, takes place almost every weekend throughout the summer. The principal events include the Headstart Rodeo (Mother's Day weekend), the Cedar Creek Rodeo (Memorial Day weekend), the Mountain Spirit celebration (July 4), and the Labor Day Rodeo, associated with the tribal fair in Whiteriver. Crown dancers, who represent the ga'an, or mountain spirits, are present to bless every significant event.

Not to be missed are the frequent Sunrise Ceremonies, coming-of-age celebrations for young women. These dances occur almost weekly. In June, the Shiwoye Festival honors elders of Arizona Indian tribes.

The reservation's 26 lakes contain rainbow, brook, and brown trout, bass, sunfish, northern pike, and arctic grayling. You'll find boat rentals at Hawley Lake; Sunrise Lake allows large motors, but elsewhere you're limited to electrics. Boating and fishing permits are required by the White Mountain tribe. In winter, try ice fishing at Sunrise Lake. The Alchesay National Fish Hatchery, four miles north of Whiteriver on State 73, stocks reservation streams and lakes.

Fishing enthusiasts are welcome to stop by and see the operation weekdays.

The plateau and mountain forests are hunter's heaven. Although deer, turkey, and antelope are off-limits, the tribe conducts regular seasons for small game, javelina, lion, and elk. Permits are required. Big game hunts are strictly regulated and require a guide. Despite stiff permit fees (upwards of $1,000 a day), hunters come from around the world for five-day backcountry trips and a virtually guaranteed bag.

The Fort Apache Museum is located at the 139-year-old former military post south of Whiteriver. Curator Edgar Perry will speak to groups about the crown dancers, history, language, and songs.

Kinishba Ruins, although unsafe to enter, are worth a visit. From Whiteriver, go six miles southwest on State Route 73, turn right on a dirt road and, bearing left, proceed about two miles.

Special use permits are required for backpacking, and you also need a permit for a picnic unless you have a current tribal permit for some other activity. West Fork Trail (94) and East Fork Trail (95) go through the magnificent unspoiled forests of the Mount Baldy Wilderness, adjacent to the reservation. Trailheads (elevation 9,000 feet) are four miles apart on State 273. No permit is required to hike in the wilderness, but the last half-mile of the trail crosses Apache land and is sometimes closed to outsiders.

The U.S. Forest Service has licensed several river tour companies to raft 54 miles of the Salt River from the bridge at U.S. 60 to a point above Roosevelt Lake. The one to five-day trips usually take place in spring; April and May are the optimal months. On the international whitewater scale of one to six, the Salt is considered a class three to class four river. You must obtain a permit to ride the river; the most convenient source is the Salt River Canyon Trading Post at the U.S. 60 river crossing.

In winter, the 42 ski runs at Sunrise, Apache, and Cyclone Circle peaks call to snow lovers. Stay at the tribe's Sunrise Ski Resort, 17 miles east of Hon Dah via State 260 and 273. Downhill and cross-country skiing, snowmobiling, sledding, and tubing are Sunrise attractions; one area is reserved for cross-country skiers near Ditch Camp.

For more information: To obtain permits and road information, contact the White Mountain Apache Game and Fish Department, Box 220, Whiteriver, AZ 85941; (602) 3384385. For winter sports, Sunrise Ski Resort, Box 217, McNary, AZ 85930; toll-free in Arizona, (800) 772-SNOW; outside Arizona, (800) 882-7669. Accommodations in nearby towns: Pinetop-Lakeside Chamber of Commerce, Box 226, PinetopLakeside, AZ 85935; (602) 367-4290. Show Low Chamber of Commerce, Box 1083, Show Low, AZ 85901; (602) 5372326. White Mountain Chamber of Commerce, Box 181, Springerville, AZ 85938; (602) 333-2123. Accommodations on the reservation: White Mountain Apache Motel and Restaurant, Whiteriver, (602) 338-4927; Hon Dah Motel, Box 597, McNary, AZ 85930; (602) 369-4311.