Roadside Rest

oadside Rest The Vision of Fred Guirey Made Happy Ways of Highways

Once years ago, I wheeled my Model A Ford off State Route 89A onto a viewpoint overlooking Oak Creek Canyon. Beneath my perch on a stone guard fence, Nature staged a show of autumn color: golden cottonwood, russet oak, scarlet sumac.

Refreshed, I descended the narrow road. Losing 2,000 feet of elevation in a few miles, the little coupe swayed through tortuous switchbacks Late afternoon's sun rays inflamed the canyon's walls. As the gloom deepened, near Indian Garden, I turned into an empty arbor by the murmuring creek. Soon a German brown trout and lyonnaise spuds sizzled over hot coals.

Supper chores done, I tossed out a tarp and bedroll. As the narrow slit of ebony sky sparkled with a thousand lights, I slept . . . until a golden eagle screamed reveille.

So it was, in most of Arizona, a half century ago.

And in the innocence of youth, I assumed that was how it would remain forever.

Few years earlier, another young man likewise was tirelessly roaming Arizona's primitive highway system. His name, Fred M. Guirey (pronounced GUY-ree).

The Highway Department's first landscape architect, he foresaw the day when along the way there must be more than a few rustic wide spots.

He sensed that America's roadsides, especially in the West, were as important as the roads themselves. While still in his 20s, Fred initiated a campaign that earned him the unofficial title Father of Our Roadside Rests.

He was born in Oakland, California, in 1908. Scratching for an education during the Great Depression, he had dropped out of school and worked to finance semesters at the universities of Arizona and California at Berkeley. In the summer of 1930, he joined the engineering crew that designed the first and still existing State Route 67 from Jacob Lake 45 miles to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Soon he won his architectural degree and fell to improving Arizona's empty - and sometimes lethal - roadsides.

His pet peeve: the borrow pit, a stiff environmental price paid in pioneer road building. Earth was borrowed from roadsides to form two high-crowned lanes surfaced with gravel, concrete, or asphalt. The plan did drain the road. But pity the motorist who ventured into a deep, rough, unforgiving borrow pit.

Fred was 27 when his crusading essays began appearing in such publications as Public Works and Better Roads magazines. Here's a sample from the April, 1935, issue of Arizona Highways.

"We widened our roads, took the kinks out of them, improved alignment, but until recently, gave little or no thought to the immediate roadside. We continued using borrow pits, narrow rights of way; permitted the erection of structures so close to the highway that they were an actual menace.

"We paid little attention to the aesthetic value of a roadside. We allowed pole line owners to butcher trees of any and all description at will. We still blasted with reckless abandon through hill and countryside, even in cases where it might have been avoided, and left unsightly, permanent scars of construction in our wake.

Many of our borrow pits have become sources of erosion, as have our steep back slopes. We stripped topsoil from the land, making plant life unable to reseed."

Before World War II shelved roadside projects, Fred in eight years had reshaped engineering attitudes within his department. By example, his works inspired roadside beautification and safety across America. Under Fred's direction, Arizona showed the way with carefully planned and executed roadside rests and viewpoints.

Among the earliest was a ramada-shaded turnout (in eastern Arizona) where U.S. Route 60 dramatically bridges the awesome Salt River Canyon. He tempered his artistry with practicality, so his choice of building materials tended toward masonry and massive logs. For Arizona's roadsides, Fred helped establish a nursery that at its peak was distributing 50,000 free trees a year.

Against stiff public resistance, Fred argued for landscaping with native species. That meant drought-resistant types for the two-thirds of Arizona classified as low and high deserts. "What? Plant more cacti in a country with millions of them already?" critics wondered.

Fred prevailed. He was a member of the team that fashioned Tucson's trailblazing "Miracle Mile," actually a 1.7mile demonstration stretch of State Route 77. Recently restored, the West's first divided, safety-engineered parkway boasts maturing paloverde trees, giant saguaros, and indigenous shrubs.

some Arizona rest stops of them solar powered, air cooled, spotlessly maintained, and costing several million dollars welcome and succor travelers. They also stand as monuments to a tall, slender,

By Don Dedera

youthful architect who championed comfortable, attractive way stations strung out across the land.

Fittingly, last October, with Catherine "Tat" Guirey and her two daughters, members of the Dons Club, park and forest rangers, successor engineers, and a new generation of motorists as witnesses, Arizona's Department of Transportation dedicated at the Oak Creek overlook a bronze plaque reading:

The Fred M. Guirey View Point 1908-1984 Father of Our Roadside Rests

Editor's Note: With this essay former Arizona Highways Editor Don Dedera begins a regular monthly column to be called, as a salute to Fred Guirey, "Roadside Rest."