Back Road Adventure

ack Road Adventure.

Ease the car off the road and onto a carpet of straw-colored pine needles. This is very close to the place, as best as I can figure, where the Tonto Apache introduced themselves to U.S. Army Gen. George Crook on a sunny August afternoon 120 years ago. There are countless places in Arizona one can go to meditate on the Apache wars, but few where the tragic movie unreels in such an astounding setting. That afternoon Crook and his cavalrymen were scouting the terrain for the incipient campaign and blazing a trail on the Mogollon Rim to serve as a supply route between Fort Apache and Fort Whipple. The soldiers were agog at the scenery opening up before them, just as tourists are today.

"It is a strange upheaval, a strange freak of nature, a mountain canted up on one side," wrote General Crook's aide and his eventual biographer, Capt. John G. Bourke. "One rides along the edge and looks down two and three thousand feet into what is termed the "Tonto Basin,' a scene of grandeur and rugged beauty." The profuse wildflowers in the Rim's forest, Bourke added, were "a carpet of colors which would rival the best examples of the looms of Turkey or Persia."

The men shouldn't have become so enchanted by the scenery. Suddenly the crisp alpine air was clotted with arrows. The troops scrambled for cover. Most of the Apache melted back into the forest, but two, encircled by Army troops, stood right on the Rim, fired their final arrows in defiance, then leapt over the precipice, apparently choosing suicide over capture. Crook's men stared in horrified amazement. But when they peered over the Rim to look for the corpses, what they saw was two very live Apache leaping "like mountain sheep" from rock to rock down the near-vertical cliff face.

TRAVEL A PATH WHERE LUSH SCENERY MINGLES WITH GHOSTS OF THE APACHE WARS

Crook himself fired, and an arm of one of the fugitives went limp, blood spurting from an artery. "He did not relax his speed a particle," wrote Bourke, "but kept up with his comrade in a headlong dash down the precipice, and escaped into the scrub-oak on the lower flanks . . . ."

Because of encounters like this, Crook developed a profound respect for the people he had been sent to Arizona to sub-due. Standing at a place on the Rim where the two Apache

WHEN YOU GO

From Payson drive north on State Route 87 to Milepost 281. Forest Service Route 300, a gravel road, is shortly beyond this milepost to the right.

Passenger cars are suitable if the road is dry. The 42-mile drive will take two to three hours. Be wary of logging trucks careening around blind curves or over hills.

TIPS FOR TRAVELERS

Back-road travel can be hazardous if you are not prepared for the unexpected. Whether traveling in the desert or in the high country be sure you and your vehicle are in top shape and your gear includes the following: appropriate clothing and footwear, food and water, medication, a first-aid kit, sunglasses, water-purification tablets, a shovel, maps (road and topographic), a compass, tools, spare tire, and a tow chain.

Last, don't travel alone, and let someone at home know where you're going and when you plan to return.

By Lawrence W. Cheek

Might have taken their impossible retreat, I feel more than respect: I am in awe. It is in places like this that the modern pale-face begins to understand a little about our predecessors' rela-tionship with the land we now call Arizona. By comparison we hardly know it at all.

The Mogollon Rim Road (Forest Service Route 300) either parallels or follows the exact path of Crook's trail for 42 miles. It was built in 1928 as a logging road, and it still serves the loggers today, as well as providing a route to several pocket-size Rim country lakes. In good weather, the gravel road is passable for two-wheel-drive cars; even my vehicle, which has the ground clearance of a Gila monster, encounters no problem. In winter, which at the Rim's 7,400-foot elevation may stretch from mid-November to late April, FR 300 doesn't exist unless you're pilot-ing a snowmobile: it never sees a plow.

This is a good road to meditate on other matters, beginning with the marvel of the Mogollon Rim itself. An eroded escarp-ment that forms the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, it probably was chipped out by some ancestor of today's Verde River in the Oligocene epoch. (The Oligocene was otherwise notable for saber-toothed tigers.) From below, just north or east of Payson, the Rim presents a horizon like no other in Arizona: a vast, green wall, planed flat on the top, butting against the northern sky as far as anyone can see. From the Rim road looking down, it is as if you're at the edge of a vast canyon except the opposing wall is missing. On the floor far below (2,000 to 2,500 feet, just as Bourke guessed) is the undulating emerald carpet of the Tonto National Forest. In the distance parades a succession of mountain ranges, the nearest blue-green, the next blue-violet, the last almost baby blue. The view has the odd quality of being both ineffably beau-tiful and unnerving at once; like the Grand Canyon, there is no spectacle elsewhere in Nature to prepare you for it.

Six miles along the road are the remains of the first of two 1990 forest fires. The first, the Bray Fire, fried 633 acres; an abandoned campfire ignited it. The Dude Fire three weeks later was started by lightning in the Tonto National Forest below. It raged up the Rim, searing 24,000 acres and killing six fire fighters. There is no scenic beauty among the black ruins of these old-growth forests, but there is a lesson: though life is incredibly fragile, the force of renewal is as inevitable as death. Earth abides.

As does, sadly, conflict among my own species. Along this road I also find the monument to the Battle of Big Dry Wash. Crook's original campaign against the Apache ended with their surrender in 1873, but some of the Tonto group continued to wage guerrilla war against the tide of ranchers flooding their lands. In July, 1882, they killed several settlers, and the U.S. Army responded with five cavalry troops. This time the battle took place too far from the Rim for the Indians' rock-climbing skills to figure, and casualties were heavy.

"The Apache was a hard foe to subdue," observed Bourke, "not because he was full of wiles and tricks and experienced in all that pertains to the art of war, but because he had so few artificial wants and depended almost absolutely upon what his great mother Nature stood ready to supply."

Words to contemplate, particularly on this road. Two Apache, faced with capture or death here 120 years ago, seized a third option that Nature supplied: a spiderlike escape down a 2,000-foot escarpment. I turn a key and nose the auto back onto the road, suddenly aware how vulnerable I'd be if the car failed me. I'm alone; it's cold, and I wouldn't have any idea how to survive the night out here.