Back Road Adventure

It is a bit after dusk but not quite true dark. Our campfire crackles to life on twigs of manzanita and grows into a blaze when we feed it the dry deadfall of ponderosa pine.

STEER INTO THE MAZATZALS FOR A FOUR-WHEELING EXPERIENCE

We are camping - seven of us on a broad wooded ridge high in the Mazatzal Mountains an hour's drive northeast of Phoenix. After an exhilarating day of four-wheel-drive exploring, bird-watching, wildflower ogling, and scenic-vista bagging in perfect spring weather, we would seem to have plenty of grandiose and inspirational things to gab about.

Instead, like countless others who've traveled into the heart of this splendorous mountain range, we find ourselves pondering a petty, but vexing, question as we wait for the chili to cook and the cornbread to cool: how do you pronounce Mazatzal?

Two members of the group insist it's "Mah-ZAHT-sahl."

Somebody else says, no, no, it's "MAH-zaht-sahl."

Then I, having made several trips to the range, and having taken pains to ask at least a dozen residents of the area how they say the word, smugly inform the campfire clan that the regional dialect calls for a different pronunciation altogether. Never mind how the word is spelled. The preferred way of saying it in these parts is "Matt-uh-zals."

The friendly argument continues about halfway into the chili.

But no matter how they pronounce the name, those who travel the area's network of back roads ranging from passenger-car routes to four-wheel-drive tracks quickly learn that Mazatzal country is wild, elegant, and endlessly beckoning.

The Mazatzals jut out of the Tonto National Forest in a diagonal northwest-to-southeast slash nearly smack in the center of the state. The essential core of the range consists of a 35-mile line of summits, ridges, and valleys from 7,449-foot North Peak to the sheer alpine-looking Four Peaks dominating the 7,645-foot skyline west of Roosevelt Lake.

Some of the pristine Mazatzal backcountry including the Mazatzal Wilderness and the Four Peaks Wilderness has been set aside by the federal government for special protection. Motorized equipment is prohibited in the Wildernesses, and no developed campsites are available. Travel is restricted to hiking and horseback riding.

A few other sites in the range, such as a ranch headquarters and an amethyst mine near the Four Peaks, are on private property, off-limits to the public.

But vast reaches of the Mazatzals are open to those with the time and the will to explore and enjoy. State Route 87 (the Beeline Highway), heading northeast from Tempe toward Payson, provides good access to the range. And State Route 188 skirts the mountains' eastern flanks.

Traveling the highways, however, amounts merely to flirting. A real relationship with the Mazatzals begins with an unhurried journey on a smooth winding back road or perhaps on something a little more bumpy, a little more steep, a little more narrow.

“We call this the O.S. bar," says Marion Saffell, grabbing at the same time for one of the security handles mounted above the side windows in the lurching four-wheeldrive vehicle.

O.S., Marion explains as the vehicle creeps along a cliff-hanging section of road, stands for "Ohhh, shoot!" Passengers tend to lunge for the O.S. bars whenever the terrain gets steep, narrow, or otherwise frightening enough to inspire such words.

It turns out that we have nothing to fear on this warm, sunny April morning. Marion's husband, Mesa physician Charles Saffell, is at the wheel, and he's intimately familiar with the road we're traveling.

The Saffells, with myself and photographer Edward McCain as passengers, left Mesa early in the morning en route to the central reaches of the Mazatzals via State 87.

The approach to the range, decorated in this season with carpets of lupine and patches of poppies, offers stunning views of Four Peaks and 7,155-foot Mount Ord.

An hour into the drive, near the top of a pass leading to the eastern side of the range, Saffell turned off the highway, locked the vehicle into four-wheel-drive, and headed up steep-and-rocky Forest Service Road 201, about 1.5 miles north of Sunflower. (Note: the road is not signed. See map.) Following us in another

Back Road Adventure

van were three Phoenix-area friends of the Saffells: Dan Pellouchoud, Karen Beebe, and Karen's six-year-old son, Dane. Now, as our little caravan snakes its way slowly out of high desert and into juniper woodland, Marion stays friendly with the O.S. bar and raves about the range.

"We started coming to the Mazatzals back in 1975 or '76 after Charles discovered the area on a birding trip," she says. "It's a 'sky island' a beautiful, isolated stand of trees sitting right up here in the middle of desert-type country. The great thing for us, and for many other people, is that it's so close to Phoenix, and yet it's such different country.

"Being out here is what it's all about. These are the times in life that you look back on and say: that was living."

Charles interrupts suddenly. "Redtailed hawk! There! Do you see it?"

We do. And Charles, an avid-to-semifanatical bird-watcher, reels off a list of other winged creatures we might spot in the Mazatzals if we're lucky: golden eagle, bald eagle, goshawk, zone-tailed hawk, Cooper's hawk, sharp-shinned hawk, gray vireo, gray flycatcher, and black-chinned sparrow, to name just a few of his favorites.

Farther up the road, we catch a glimpse of a doe a white-tail, we think bounding up a steep hillside. Javelina, black bears, coyotes, and other familiar desert-mountain wildlife species also roam parts of the Mazatzals.

Just 30.5 miles from McDowell Road and Route 87 in Mesa, we arrive at today's destination: Pine Butte. We set up camp in a forested glade on a broad ridge affording stunning views toward Mazatzal Peak, the 7,894-foot high point of the range. It takes only a few minutes to pitch our tents in the shade of tall pon-derosas, which share the butte with clumps of manzanita and lit-tle groves of oak.

Marion lays out a lavish lunch while the rest of us scramble up several unintimidating rock pinnacles. From a stony aerie above the pines, we admire the ramparts of Mazatzal Peak to the north and the flat blue smear of Roosevelt Lake to the southeast.

The seven of us pass the rest of this day and part of the next hiking to places like Horse Camp Seep, wandering canyons where gold miners toiled for fortunes, and not least of all soaking up the peace and quiet of this place so near and still so far from the cacophony of metropolitan Phoenix.

Pellouchoud, an engineer with the Salt River Project, one of the area's energy companies, delights in finding springs brimming and streams flowing high after a winter of abundant rains.

Beebe, a native Alaskan, who works as a nurse in Mesa, eyes the high ridges of the range and dreams of a backpacking trip in the Wilderness heights.

"Up here in the pines, it reminds me a little bit of Alaska," she says wistfully.

Just before dusk, McCain scrambles to a high point of rock to admire the sunset and scope out the likely angles of sunrise light. The next morning, while the rest of us nestle in sleeping bags or concoct strong coffee, he will be back on the ridgetop communing with his camera, lenses, filters, and tripod as the first light touches gray rock and green lichen.

But now, at the end of this day, it is campfire time, chili time, cornbread time... and time to carry on the "Mazatzal argument."

I turn in at 10 o'clock tired, well-fed, and absolutely secure in the knowledge that, whatever my other failings, I do pronounce the name of these mountains correctly.

Mazatzal back roads, because of the nearly 8,000-foot altitude of the range, sometimes are impassable during the winter and early spring. But once the snows retreat to the high ridges and north-facing hollows, the roads dry out, mountain slopes flush green with new growth, and streams swell to their banks.

It is in this exuberant time of the year that my wife, Donna, and I return to the area and coax the pickup into action on some of the unpaved roads in lower elevations of the Mazatzals.

We try yet another route this one Forest Service Road 419 (.2 of a mile south of Rye off State 87), a well-maintained fivemile passage across a high-desert plateau to the Barnhardt Trailhead. The trail, which begins in a clump of fat green juniper trees, wends along a deep-cut gorge that's frothing with snowmelt. We walk for a while, then lollygag for half an hour beside a bed of hedgehog cactus that's blooming on a cliff above a waterfall. It is easy to grow greedy in the Mazatzal backcountry, expecting the superlative at every turn and pretty much finding it. Our last stop is no letdown. The truck rumbles up a road into yet another dimension of Mazatzal country. We pass a ranch house, a mine, and another ranch before pulling into a sort of riparian heaven complete with a broad flowing stream, marshy lowlands, and granddaddy cottonwoods.

Here, we take an almost wordless walk at dusk. Later, we dine from the tailgate and savor a riverside concert of croaking amphibians, trilling songbirds, and the lulling music of water tumbling downstream.

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 aware of weather and road conditions and make sure you and your vehicle are in top shape and you have plenty of water.

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

Once again we have bungled into blessings at the end of a good back road. After the O.S. bar thrills, after the rare birds and bounding deer, after the Coleman-stove chili and drop-dead sunsets after all of that, we sit in our secluded corner of the Mazatzals and accept it like a sacrament this moment of peace.