Back Road Adventure

BACK ROAD ADVENTURE A Four-wheel Assault on Four Peaks Gets You Some Rough Going and Startling Scenery

We didn't set out to stare at a plant. Nobody lurches 30 miles along a cratered mountain road to do that, except maybe a desperately-seeking-tenure botanist.

We were just planning a close encounter with Jerry Sieve's favorite central Arizona mountain range. Sieve, a photographer, lives in Carefree, 20 miles northeast of Phoenix. The Four Peaks of the Mazatzal Mountains in Tonto National Forest poke up to 7,645 feet into the sky 30 miles east of his house, and they're the first place he looks on a winter morning after an overnight storm to see if there's snow.

If the peaks are white, Sieve says, some demented Phoenicians will truck up to them, shovel a pickup bed full of snow, and rush back to the city for a neighborhood snowball fight under the palm trees. "Actually it's more like an iceball fight by the time you get it down there," he admits.

He also respects the Four Peaks for their obstinate character. From 5,000 feet below at Carefree, they don't look all that intimidating, but a handson climb reveals them to be seriously rugged and alarmingly pointy. Sieve, a manic outdoor guy who'll try to climb anything if there's a picture worth taking on it, has failed in every one of his assaults on the peaks.

There is Tonto National Forest Service Road 143, however. It doesn't grapple with the peaks, but it brushes close enough for some lovely views. And it bisects a grove of the most astonishing trees in Arizona, trees the textbooks tell us do not exist.

The forest road curls off the Beeline Highway, State Route 87, about 10 miles northeast of the last suburban tentacles of metropolitan Phoenix. The desert flatlands rapidly yield to desert canyons, the road hugging their sides. The landscape grows increasingly jagged. Upheavals of boulders the size of Pontiacs litter the hillsides. Saguaros cling resolutely to the most preposterous slopes. The road grows worse, and we lurch into four-wheel drive. I tell Sieve I see why he laughed off my offer to drive my sophisticated 16-valve, dual-overheadcam sports car.

"Still, I once met a guy com-ing along here in a '56 Cadillac," he says. "It was probably Edward Abbey."

By the time we near the road's summit at Lone Pine Saddle, the craters and furrows are so wretched that we park the truck and hoof the last half mile. This short hike turns out to be a blessing. If we'd stayed in the truck, we might have overlooked one of the most spectacular Arizona trees either of us had ever seen.

According to Arizona Flora, the botanical bible of the state, Arctostaphylos Pringlei isn't supposed to be a tree. Commonly called manzanita, it's a shrub that almost never grows higher than a hiker's head, about six feet. Groves of manzanita, with their satinlike red bark, thrive in chaparral and piñon-juniper woodland from around 4,500 to 7,500 feet in elevation. In spring their lovely pink flowers draw noisy clouds of bees, and in summer their miniature applelike fruit (manzanita is Spanish for "little apple") gladdens the hearts of birds and bears.We have stumbled across the Godzilla of manzanitas. I judge this monster to be three times Sieve's height, which would make it 18 feet. It is decidedly a tree, not a bush. It has five trunks, the stoutest as thick as Sieve's mountain-climbing-enhanced thighs.

And it isn't merely gigantic; it's beautiful. The trunks are natural sculptures. Part of their surface is exposed rough graywhite wood, but the characteristic red manzanita bark seems to be trying to swaddle it. The deep-red bark looks like exposed muscle tissue, or maybe some kind of smooth, thick, rufous sauce that oozed down the trunks and froze in a dramatic embrace.A few minutes later, Sieve and I discover an entire grove of giant manzanita trees across the road. Every one is between 10 and 15 feet tall. Wandering among them is actually disconcerting; we feel like some forest wizard has shrunken us