recreation

Along the BLUE

A Summer Trail Ride Offers More Than

Primitive Outback

"WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO TAKE A SHORT CUT," HE SAID. "THERE'S NO TELLING what this storm is going to do." Jim Joy, our guide, referred to the route out of the narrow canyon where we had spent the previous two days and nights getting rained on. We camped at Franz Spring, roughly 12 miles east of his home on the Blue River in the wild and remote mountains of the 173,762-acre Blue Range Primitive Area of eastern Arizona. Around noon the clouds parted long enough to get the horses saddled and packed. Everyone - there were eight of us on the trip - agreed it was time to make a break for it. As we left, the horses gingerly picked their way through the chocolate mud and jagged rocks covering the trail. Just below Cow Flat, we turned northwest up Lamphier Canyon and for the next hour rode in and out of a downpour. Bullet acted fussy. I'd been riding him for two days, and he had responded easily to the slightest pressure on the reins or a gentle tap with my heels. That last afternoon he was different. As we approached a hill near Cow Flat, he suddenly stopped dead on a steep and narrow sliver of the trail, no place to get into a contest with 900 pounds of horse, so I dismounted and walked him up the hill. When I got back on and headed downhill toward Cow Flat, he seemed to settle down. Later we started the climb up out of Lamphier Canyon, and the trail became hollow-sounding slickrock with oaks and small junipers on one side and the rest of the planet stretching down a cliff off the other. Several horses headed out in front of me with Jim Joy in the lead trailing a pack animal. Cassie Joy, Jim's wife, led a pack animal behind me. As we approached the summit of the hill, the slickrock made a 90degree turn. Bullet made the turn and froze, burying his nostrils in a juniper about as tall as he. Facing a downward slope of rock, he would

Along the BLUE

not budge. I gave him my heels and tried to move him around to the lee side of the trail, but he would have none of it. Suddenly his front legs went rigid, his back arched, and I felt his neck tense. He did a pirouette in that narrow space and bucked once, trying to throw me off on the downhill side of the trail. I leaned forward, moving my weight over his front legs, and he calmed down. Orlin Wathen, Jim's friend who had been assisting on the trip, offered to swap horses. I needed little prompting. Wathen let a notch or two out of Bullet's chest strap, and the horse remained gentle the rest of the afternoon. The other riders were impressed that I had managed to keep from getting myself thrown, so it must have looked like I knew what I was doing. I said nothing to disabuse them of that notion, but I don't think Bullet was fooled. Bullet, a six-year-old paint with red eyelashes that seldom flickered, looked fast. I assumed that was how he acquired his name, as in "faster than a speeding bullet." But no. I was riding a horse that carried a bullet in his shoulder.

"That horse was called Nibbles when we got him," Jim said. "About three years ago, we were out deer hunting with some friends. A 16-year-old boy rode with us, and his rifle fell out of the scabbard. He stopped to get it, and when he put it back in, it discharged." "You mean he accidentally shot his own horse?" "No," Jim said. "It was weirder than that. He was riding the horse ahead of Bullet. When the rifle discharged, the bullet ricocheted off a rock and hit the trailing horse between the neck and the shoulder. "One of the guys on the hunt put his finger into the wound until it quit bleeding. The horse jumped around with him for a while until the bleeding stopped. "I asked the vet about it when we got back, and he said the bullet - it was a .243 caliber was so hot it cauterized the wound. He said it was okay to leave it where it was. Naturally, Nibbles became Bullet."The Blue Range Primitive Area sprawls in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, straddling the Blue River between Alpine on the north and Clifton on the south, some 250 miles east of Phoenix. One of the wildest and most isolated stretches of roadless terrain remaining in Arizona, its main inhabitants are deer, elk, mountain lions, and black bears. The rugged region also was known for its grizzlies until 1935, when the last one was killed. I began making periodic visits to the Blue some 25 years ago, but the high forested hills that rise east and west of the river conceal so much that when I went back for a three-day trail ride, I found myself in country I'd never seen before. To make sure we didn't get lost, photographer Randy Prentice and I hooked up with Jim. Prentice and I had spent the night before

our trip at Hannagan Meadow, and in the morning drove 13 miles down unpaved Red Hill Road. After fording the Blue River twice, we rolled into Jim's 160-acre "yard" to find him and Cassie saddling our horses. A few hours later, we clambered through a tangle of cottonwoods, willows, and oaks along the river. Suddenly we found ourselves switchbacking out of a wash choked with rocks and snapping brush and ascending a narrow trail - a cow path, really that took us above the streamside vegetation to massive stands of alligator junipers. In about three hours, we reached the top of Upper Steeple Canyon, where we tied the horses to the lower branches of ponderosas in a grassy clearing near Hinkle Spring. Here the talk turned to the vanished grizzlies. Arizona Game and Fish Department records say the last grizzly here was killed six decades ago at Strayhorse, now a campground four miles south of Blue Vista, a viewpoint along the Coronado Trail (U.S. Route 191). Tangible reminders of that era are rare nowadays, but as we mounted our horses after lunch and headed southeast, we came upon the ruins of what looked like a small log structure at the spot called Cow Flat. Jim said it was a grizzly trap, probably built in the 1920s or '30s. "They'd put bait in it, and when the bear got in there he'd trip the door and be trapped," he explained. "If the hunters got back here in 24 hours, he'd probably still be in there." We did not see a single bear during our three days in the wild, though later we heard plenty of bear stories. Elaine Marks told us about a bear that visited the cabin at Franz Spring where we had camped, sleeping in tents because a colOnly of bees had taken over the inside of the cabin. Marks knows that cabin well. Located on the grazing allotment for the WY Bar Ranch, which she and her late husband ran for many years, the cabin is now owned by her son, Billy.The line shack looks a hundred years old, but in fact it was erected in the 1950s. "That cabin has had a rough life," Marks said. "A few years ago, three hikers from Albuquerque camped in it and were terrorized by a bear. It kept trying to get into the cabin. It broke a window. It climbed up on the roof and knocked the chimney pipe over. I think at one point it actually did get inside the cabin. One of the men had some Vienna Sausages in his pack, and the bear went after those. They just had an awful time of it, and none of them had firearms to scare it off. Eventually, it wandered away on its own." Fortunately our biggest problem was not bears but rain. The sky dawned still steel-gray on the morning we planned to take the horses up to Bear Mountain, a five-mile climb from our camp. We set out on a trail already muddy from the previous night's rain, and in a half hour Jim stopped. The skies had opened, and the rain came in sheets. The trail, barely wide enough for a horse to get through, hugged the side of a hill and dropped off sharply to our right. One misstep on slick rocks or in the deep-ening mud, and the horses would have plunged into a dense and rocky forest.

Along the BLUE

"This doesn't look like it's going to break up, and if we get up on Bear Mountain, we're going to be exposed to an awful lot of lightning," Jim said. We agreed to turn around and return to camp.

A few hours later, the sky remained gray, but it had cleared enough to take another excursion. By then Bear Mountain was out of the question we would have had to return after dark, and nobody wanted to chance that. Instead we ascended a ridge just west of Tige Canyon and came upon a grassy saddle sprinkled with yellow, white, and purple daisies.

While Randy Prentice waited for the wind to stop so the flowers would quit wiggling, and he could take a photograph, I rode up to the nearest ridgeline. In the distance, the seemingly endless folds of the Gila Mountains undulated toward the eastern horizon, a black silhouette under a dismal sky. The rain of the previous night had left clusters of clouds drifting like a caravan in the canyons below me. Undoubtedly, it would rain again. Later that afternoon, with the sky still threatening, we returned to our camp at Franz Spring. Jim gathered a bunch of wet logs and sprinkled them with "cowboy kindling," also known as Coleman fuel. When the logs burned down to embers, well after dark, Jim and Cassie grilled some thick steaks. Orlin stacked on more logs, and before long, shadows from the flames danced in the surrounding brush. Lightning fractured the black canopy in the ponderosa treetops, and the time seemed ripe for a good ghost story.

"I know one," Jim said. "It's about Walt McCool."

I'd heard of Walt. He lived a bachelor's life along the Blue for roughly 40 years, picking up odd jobs as a carpenter, and trapping at ranches on the river. He was sometimes drunk, usually amiable, often broke, and everybody loved him. He died in 1973. With little thought of the difference between a "true" ghost story and a made-up ghost story, I urged Jim on.

"You know," he began, "Walt had a place on the river between Blue Crossing and the old school. That's where the old Forest Service site used to be."

I remembered the spot. At some point, Jim said, the Forest Service told Walt he could not continue living there. Walt refused to budge. "I'm never leaving!" he declared.

As almost everyone along the Blue knows, you can fight the Forest Service only so long. The local rangers may be your old buddies, but there's always somebody in Albuquerque or Washington who calls the shots. In short, Walt had no choice. Eventually he was forced to leave.

Soon afterward, the story goes, he died, probably of a broken heart.

"Well," said Jim, "after Walt died, the Forest Service crew came in and started clearing the house and trees, and the darndest thing happened. Every tree they cut into started to bleed! That wasn't the end of it, though, because once they cut down the trees, they suddenly saw Walt's face appear in every stump remaining on the ground! They dropped their chain saws and ran like the devil."

Clearly, he said, Walt had kept his word. He never left.

Around 9 P.M. thunder echoed off the surrounding cliffs, and lightning once again zigzagged in the dense sky. With images of bleeding tree trunks still fresh in my head, I crawled into the tent I shared with Prentice. I quickly went into a deep dream-filled sleep, but suddenly in the pitch blackness, I felt a sharp jab in my arm and bolted upright.

"You're snoring," said Prentice.

I turned over, relieved that nobody was coming at me with a chain saw after all, and that the dream was only another ghost story. The kind that the wild country of the Blue inspires.

Tucson-based Sam Negri has been writing about Arizona's isolated communities for more than 25 years. He also wrote the following story about Herschel Downs. Tucson-based Randy Prentice says that the best way to explore the Blue Range Primitive Area is on horseback.

WHEN YOU GO

In addition to picture-postcard scenery, the Blue Range Primitive Area offers hiking, camping, and fishing, as well as the chance to see a variety of wildlife, including such rare birds as the American peregrine falcon and the southern bald eagle. As summer storms may wrack the region in July and August, and snows fall from November to March, the best recreational months are April through May and September through October.

For more information on recreational opportunities in the Blue Range Primitive Area, contact the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest headquarters in Springerville, (520) 333-4301.