Back Road Adventure

The eight families that live along Eagle Creek in the mountains of eastern Arizona look forward to Wednesday. That's the day they get mail delivered to their isolated ranches. Most of them have to walk or drive a city block or more to reach their mailboxes at the side of a finicky dirt road. Still, it's more convenient than making the 100-mile round-trip to the post office in Clifton.

THE TIMELESS LAND ALONG EAGLE CREEK

You never know what the mail truck will bring down the torturous road. Stella Hughes recently asked the pound in Clifton to send her a few cats. The mailman wasn't thrilled with the idea, but he obliged anyway, delivering a box with six well-jostled kittens.

The mail and animals pretty much define the borders of life in this remote location, though an unofficial poll shows that animals seem to hold the edge as the most frequently discussed topic.

For example, lion hunter Dean Warren has been camped on Eagle Creek for the last year, primarily because he earns part of his income guiding big-game hunters in the area. One day he was driving past the Hughes place when he noticed a smudge in the tawny dirt road. He veered his truck into the Hughes driveway and announced, "A lion dragged a calf across the road right here."

Stella and her husband, Mack she's 76, he's 83 - have been around cattle all their lives, but lately they hadn't seen any wildlife bigger than the pesky bat that kept zooming down their chimney. Yet Warren had no doubt they'd find a dead calf in the vicinity. "He followed the drag mark into the brush just back of the house, and, sure enough, a partially eaten calf was buried under some leaves and branch-es that's what the lions do, you know," said Stella. "They'll eat some and then cover it up and come back when they're hungry again."

Warren went back to his camp for his hounds and his gun. Three of the hounds picked up the lion's scent immediately and chased it into a nearby tree. Warren shot it down.

Eagle Creek is wild and woolly ranch country, and the general drift is that a lion that kills a calf has veered dan-gerously off its normal diet of deer and smaller game. State laws permit the shooting of a stock-killing lion. The evidence of the lion's behavior usually is in its stomach.

All of this is not meant to suggest that the cowboys of Eagle Creek have a nasty attitude toward animals. When I visited the one-room schoolhouse at Eagle Creek (See Arizona Highways, July '92), two of the 11 students enrolled there were absent. Everyone knew why. Those two youngsters had a couple of pigs they were going to enter in the upcoming 4-H show, and they needed some time off from school to get the critters spruced up. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation to teacher Harold Schnebly and the rest of his class, who well understood the embarrassment of trying to win anything with a dis-heveled pig.

If animals are such an important ingredient in the consciousness of Eagle Creek folk, it is undoubtedly because two-legged creatures are vastly outnumbered by deer, elk, bears, lions, and cattle. A visit to the area illustrates why this is so. Eagle Creek is so remote that the kids there don't wish for anything as mundane as a bike or a Nintendo game. "What I wish for," said 12year-old Jake Cox, son of master artist A.L. (Tim) Cox, "is a Wal-Mart or even a Circle K store."

In a place where there are 18 registered voters (two of whom live 70 miles away), it's unlikely Jake will ever get his wish. Eagle Creek is at the bottom of a huge rolling prairie, 15 miles from the nearest paved road, and the paved road is so steep and winding that your vehicle can cover only 20 miles in a half hour.

The dirt road that drops off U.S. Route 191 from the vicinity of Grey Peak to Eagle Creek and a forest campground called Honeymoon also is steep and twisted, much of it spiced with enough washboard to relocate your spleen.

For all that, the journey to Eagle Creek remains one of the most scenic excursions to a part of Arizona that hasn't changed much in the last hundred years. The residents still live without normal electric and telephone service. Every ranch has its own generator, run by propane or gas, and the schoolhouse has a telephone hooked up to a car battery that can bounce a message off a transmitter in the high mountains to the east.

Back Road Adventure.

People do not relish Eagle Creek for its conveniences, but as Charles Collingwood wrote to his fiancée in 1915, "Very few artists, with all the colors at their command, can do justice to this land. There are a lot of people who would give a lot of cookies to see it."

When Honeymoon Campground was a ranger station, Collingwood worked there for two years, 1914 and 1915. He described his isolated existence at Eagle Creek in letters to Jean Cummings in Michigan prior to their marriage.

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.

To reach this wild and scenic terrain from Tucson or Phoenix, drive Interstate 10 east to the exit for U.S. Route 191 (formerly U.S. Route 666). Take 191 north to Safford, then northeast from Safford to the copper mining communities of Clifton and Morenci. From the Rode-Inn Motel in Clifton on a paved but narrow, winding road it is 32 miles to the Forest Service Road 217 turnoff for Eagle Creek. FR 217 is immediately past Milepost 188 on the left side of the road. You'll see a 217 road marker as soon as you make your turn.

Eagle Creek crosses the dirt road 15 miles and some 2,000 feet down the mountain (there's a sign at the river, which may be dry at this point).

About 5.1 miles into the drive you will cross a one-lane bridge. At 13.9 miles and 14.4 miles in, you will come to a couple of unsigned forks in the road; take the left both times.

The campground, in a grove of giant cottonwoods and box elders, is another nine miles beyond the creek. There are rest rooms (handicapped accessible), a picnic table, and barbecue grate but no drinking water at the site. The creek rushes over its rocky course a few yards from the campground.

Four-wheel drive is not necessary most of the year, but a highclearance vehicle is because the road crosses two creek beds before reaching Eagle Creek and then splashes through the creek twice more before Honeymoon Campground.

For those seeking peace and quiet and natural beauty, Eagle Creek is the perfect destination. Remote, sure, but not that hard to get to.