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TWISTS AND TURNS LEAD TO UNRIVALED BEAUTY AND ADVENTURE ON THE Coronado Trail

ABOUT 150 FEET UP THE ROAD from Hannagan Meadow Lodge, where I sat sipping a cup of coffee, a dozen deer peeked from a dense forest of pine, spruce, and aspen. One by one, they cautiously stepped into full view and then crossed the pavement. There hadn't been more than four cars down the road in the last few hours, and in here are 525 curves between Clifton and Alpine, a ride requiring constant vigilance. Reach for your radio dial at the wrong moment, and you could end up missing a curve and plunging into a rocky abyss.

the previous two days I'd seen more wildlife than humans.

The late-May temperature hovered around 70° F. in the high country of east-central Arizona, and the evening light had softened and turned blue in the dark layers of the spruce trees at the edge of the meadow. I counted my blessings and thought about my surroundings.

I was roughly midway along the scenic 120-mile Coronado Trail. Designated as U.S. Route 191, it begins in the high desert, in the copper mining town of Clifton, and climbs steeply for 70 miles, gaining roughly 4,500 feet in altitude before it levels out above 9,000 feet in the dense forests of the White Mountains and on the eastern edge of the Mogollon Rim. This road is not for people in a hurry.

There are 525 curves between Clifton and Alpine, a ride requiring constant vigilance. Reach for your radio dial at the wrong moment, and you could end up missing a curve and plunging into a rocky abyss.

I drove it north to south, which meant starting at Springerville and going down to Clifton. Within five miles of U.S. 191, I left Springerville, made a wide swing to the east, and dipped southward, passing a small clump of picturesque cabins called Nutrioso.

Heading east onto Forest Service Road 56 about five miles north of Alpine, I skirted the murky little pond called Hulsey Lake and started to climb through the thinning air. Ahead sprawled Terry Flat, a shoulder off the southeast side of Escudilla Mountain. The higher I climbed the flat is at 9,500 feet the more snow I encountered in the shade below hillsides filled with hammered rocks and broken roots. In places the snow was melting, and it slipped along the road like a lazy stream.

The road looked like a lollipop with the big circle at the top being the road that goes around Terry Flat. I'd been there before in full summer, but now, early in the season, the air was still crisp. Finally I came to the bowl that is Terry Flat, but I had driven no more than a quarter-mile when a six-foot snowdrift blocked the road and there was no way around it that I was willing to chance. So I uncorked my thermos, poured some coffee, and thought about Escudilla and Aldo Leopold and grizzly bears.

Leopold had been a forest ranger in this area in the early 1900s, and in later years he became the nation's prime mover for establishing wilderness areas. He once wrote a short essay called "Thinking Like a Mountain," and everybody knows he was thinking of Escudilla, the place where, he believed, Arizona's last grizzly bear was killed. The bear he wrote about probably was the next to the last one killed in the state, but that hardly matters. He was talking about a beautiful wild place that could suck the bitter from any cynic and turn a person into something dreamy like the still eye of an old Lab retriever.

I left Escudilla reluctantly. I'd intended to hike the trail that begins north of the loop and climbs through the Escudilla Wilderness to the double-headed summit looming 10,955 feet high, but I hadn't been up there long enough to adjust to the altitude.

Instead I headed for Alpine, the closest thing resembling civilization between Springerville and Clifton. Before reaching the town, I turned east off U.S. 191 again to visit Tal-Wi-Wi Lodge, a fixture in the area since 1947. I'd stayed there a long time ago when even "rustic" was a bit of a stretch in description, and I was curious to see if anything had changed. It turned out the place had been through several owners, and the latest had turned it into countrified luxury: Two rooms have their own Jacuzzis. In June of 1997, the owners, Mike Druse and Katie Sinor, got permission from the Forest Service to take people on jeep tours to Escudilla and the Blue River and off to the west on Middle Mountain.

I didn't spend much time in tiny Alpine, though I could have overnighted there and eaten my fill. But I didn't want towns; I wanted to be out there somewhere with a meadow and a creek and chiseled cliffs.

So I drove east off U.S. 191, and just as I approached Luna Lake, I turned south again onto the dirt road designated Apache County 2104 and FR 281. I was headed for the Blue River, which most of the year flows gently through a pastoral paradise but which can be wild in the summer floods.

It had been ages since I'd gone down to the Blue, and not much had changed. The Adirondack lean-tos had been restored at the Upper Blue Campground, an "interpretive" sign had been erected at the Blue Crossing Campground, and a fence had been put up near the petroglyphs at the north end of that little campsite.

I snaked down the newly widened dirt road into the Blue River Country, gave a nod to the Upper Blue Campground, and headed for Blue Crossing. After crossing the river into the campground, I poked around to be sure the gas cap I left there 15 years ago was indeed gone, and then I took a look at the artwork prehistoric Indians had etched into the big rock behind the fence. I could never quite figure out what those Indians were trying to record, and evidently I was one with the experts because the "interpretive" sign pretty much said that nobody else knew what was going on, either. Comforted by a common ignorance, I headed downriver to the WY Bar Ranch, which used to be owned by Elaine Marks and is now owned by her son, Bill.

I crossed the river again above the Marks' place people on the Blue often describe distances by the number of river crossings between two points and made a fast switchback into the ranch's headquarters. Elaine invited me in, and we talked for a good while about the ranch and who had died and who had married and who had moved on since I was there last. Leaving Elaine at her doorstep, I drove north, but instead of heading 22 miles to Alpine, I took the Red Hill Road 13 miles back up to the Rim and U.S. Route 191. That unpaved road was a little narrower and more serpentine than the road to Alpine, but I knew it would top out at Beaver-head, just north of Hannagan Meadow. Shortly before I reached the Rim, I passed a clearing to the south and watched a herd of cows grazing in a rich green meadow. Not far from the cattle, a dozen elk grazed in the same basket.

(LEFT) The east fork of the Black River gurgles past a stand of sedge and bedstraw. (RIGHT) The white trunks of quaking aspen stand in stark contrast with the deep blue of the high-country sky at Terry Flat in the Escudilla Wilderness.

I arrived at Hannagan Meadow in late afternoon, and I was famished. The restaurant was closed for a few hours between lunch and dinner, but waitress Roberta Stultz said, "Oh, come on. We're closed but I can fix you up a sandwich of something," a gesture that no doubt earned her a place in heaven. I booked a cabin and ended up with two rooms and a wood stove on a rise that smelled of ponderosa pines.

WHEN YOU GO

All telephone numbers are in area code (520). For information about recreational opportunities along the Coronado Trail in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, including camping, fishing, hiking, and picnicking, contact the forest headquarters in Springerville, 333-4301. To inquire about the Escudilla Wilderness and the upper Blue Range Primitive Area, call the Alpine Ranger District, 339-4384. For the lower Blue Range Primitive Area and southern end of the national forest along the Coronado Trail, call the Clifton Ranger District, 687-1301. For overnight accommodations, call: Hannagan Meadow Lodge, 339-4370; Tal-Wi-Wi Lodge, 339-4319. For additional information, including other places to stay, contact local chambers of commerce: Alpine, 339-4330; Springerville-Eagar, 333-2123; Clifton, 865-3313.

The sun looked like it would hang around another two hours so I drove off again, heading south five miles to KP Cienega, one of the most stunning camping and hiking areas along the Coronado Trail. KP Campground sits adjacent to a lush green meadow, surrounded by broad mountains and evergreens with a marshy area along KP Creek. Skunk cabbage grows in abundance along the creek, and one of the many theories about the name "KP" holds that it was an acronym for "Kabbage Patch," a moniker applied by someone with a spelling problem.

I sat on a picnic table at KP looking east to see if any elk or bears would surface in the patches of snow that remained in the shade. None did. I stretched out on the table to enjoy the quiet and inhaled the fragrance of the damp aspens nearby. My mind wandered over the Coronado Trail, following unpaved routes west to the Black River at Buffalo Crossing where I used to camp and fish, and east to the bottom of KP Canyon and Herschel Downs' ranch.

Over the years, I'd met several of the people who lived in this terrain, but Robert Hannagan was before my time. Hannagan was a rancher in the area around 1886. One of many anecdotes portrays him as a slippery country boy. He supposedly bought some cattle from a rancher and paid with a bad check. Some time later, the rancher encountered Hannagan

Coronado Trail

and let him know what he thought of men who write rubber checks. Hannagan shook his head and explained that he had two checking accounts, and darned if he hadn't written the check on the wrong account. "Here," he said, "let me write you a check right now and get this business straightened out." He handed the check to the cattleman, but suddenly winced and said something like, "Oops! Darned if I didn't make a mistake and write that check for $20 over the right amount." No problem, the cattleman replied, and reached into his pocket and gave him the $20 in cash. The rancher later discovered he'd been given a second bad check and taken for another $20 on top of that.

Stories of this sort may be more a part of the area's folklore than its history.

The country where Hannagan kept his cows remains isolated. Most of this terrain along the Coronado Trail is part of the 2million-acre Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, which includes 680 miles of trout streams and portions of four rivers: the Blue, the Black, the Little Colorado, and the San Francisco. The route was named the Coronado Trail because when it was dedicated in June of 1926, someone believed it was the route taken by Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado Co during his 16th-century expedition in search of the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola. Coronado's route may actually have been many miles to the west.

For a long time, one of the biggest problems along the trail was that pull-outs were few and far between and rest rooms and campgrounds almost nonexistent. It usually takes about two hours to drive from Morenci to the vicinity of Hannagan Meadow, but it's a long two hours when you can't find a place to take a break. In the last few years, however, campgrounds, picnic areas, and chemical toilets have been installed, roughly six to eight miles apart, between the old Granville campground near Morenci and Blue Vista, a lookout point about 10 miles south of Hannagan Meadow.

From Escudilla Mountain south to Hannagan Meadow, KP Cienega, and the Blue River, the Coronado Trail's story unfolds in uncommon isolation and cool green forests redolent with pines, a world where wild raspberry bushes grow taller than the bears. It takes some effort to get to this country, but seldom is the pay-off at the road's end any better.

Tucson-based Sam Negri has been visiting spots along the Coronado Trail for 20 years.

When visiting the White Mountains, Randy Prentice has difficulty deciding whether to go fishing or photographing.