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MOGOLLON

It shows up on maps as little more than a jagged ink line making its way across Arizona. One of the state's defining natural features, this giant, slanting escarpment of volcanic and sedimentary rock and pine has frustrated and hypnotized travelers for hundreds of years.

The rock monster serves as a boundary between two distinct worlds the cool high country above it and the burning deserts below - a precipice where dreams can begin or where they might end.

The Mogollon Rim.

Even the word remains a mystery. “Say, where's this Magnolia, er Mulligan... ah ... m-m-Mongolian rim you folks got around here?” tourists ask.

Locals will tell you “Moggy-own” is correct. (The name probably comes from Juan Ignacio Flores Mogollon, Spanish governor of New Mexico from 1712-15.) Geologists will tell you it was formed by a great up-heaval followed by flooding and erosion in the Mesozoic age. Geographers will tell you it measures 200 miles long and forms the southern end of the Colorado Plateau.

Ordinary folks simply stand on its most dramatic point and gaze up at its 2,000foot high rock facings and try to find words to match its magnificence. But most never give a second thought to the particulars of its course, what's along it, or what it means.

The answers to those questions lie along Forest Service Road 300, the Rim Road, anchored on the west by the communities of Strawberry and Pine and on the east by Show Low, Pinetop and Lakeside.

The drive covers a major portion of the Rim, 120 miles, some of them rough, passing campgrounds, hiking trails, seven lakes and numerous lookouts. It offers abundant wildlife-viewing in three national forests - Coconino, Tonto and Sitgreaves.

Plan for at least two days and don't expect easy answers: Alive, theatrical, always changingthe Rim is an elusive character.

Even its signature pine trees, so thick in the journey's earliest stages east of Strawberry and Pine, give way at the 12.5-mile mark. The dirt road curls through thick stands of ponderosa pines before suddenly opening to a pasture of stripped poles standing bare, their limbs outstretched like grasping arms. A decade ago, the lightning-sparked blaze later named the Dude Fire (PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 18 AND 19) Gnarled ponderosa pines cling to the edge of the Mogollon Rim at Promontory Point. In the distance, the Mazatzal Mountains appear to float above the rolling canyonlands. NICK BEREZENKO (ABOVE) The Mogollon Rim nearly bisects the state, separating Arizona's central highlands from the Colorado Plateau to the north. JERRY SIEVE (OPPOSITE PAGE) Douglas firs frame a hundred-mile view from the Rim's edge. A member of the pine family and not a true fir, the Douglas fir grows taller than any other tree in Arizona. NICK BEREZENKO burned the trees. Hundreds of blackened and ghostly logs nearly cover the ground nearby. The effect appears almost gothic.

But it fits perfectly. The Rim, a place of extremes, inspires grand, sometimes lunatic ideas.

In 1883 the operators of the Arizona Mineral Belt Railroad set out to lay track

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from Flagstaff south through the pine forests, over the Rim to Tonto Basin and on to Globe. But they had no intention of going over the Rim. No, these fellows planned to dynamite a hole through it, fashioning a tunnel 3,000 feet long and 16 feet wide.

Entrepreneurs actually stood atop this imposing mass, hands on hips, gazed at their surroundings, evidently without anything approaching normal human awe, and said, “Sure, we can do this.” Men hired to drive the spikes received no pay, agreeing to take company stock as compensation. Globe’s Arizona Silver Belt newspaper reported the laborers worked just as hard as if “they were making $4 a day, cash.” Modern-day visitors can relive their hallucination by hiking down the Railroad Tunnel Trail (TR 390). It begins off TR 290, 12 miles from the start of FR 300, and makes its curling, boulder-strewn way down the Rim.

The hike measures only a bit longer than a half-mile, but proves steep and challenging. Somewhere here, amid the plunging canyon sides and nasty shrub tangles, hides the tunnel opening, said to have penetrated 70 feet by the time the on-again, off-again work finally stopped in 1887.

On flat ground at the canyon bottom, a pile of stones once served as the railroad’s powder magazine. I sat on a log next to its remnants, and before long I, too, was thinking, “Yeah, a tunnel through here makes perfect sense.” The Rim does that to people.

Twenty-five years ago, some loggers were driving near Turkey Springs, 19 miles east of the intersection of the Rim Road and State Route 260, when they spotted a brilliant blue light. One of the men approached it and was knocked to the ground by some unknown force, causing his companions to flee. When they returned, the man was gone. He turned up, dazed and confused, four days later near Heber.

The story that emerged involved abduction by alien spaceship. To this day, you can spot believers walking through the little roadside meadow, certain the ground emits a kind of magic.

My Rim guide, 72-year-old Al Ayers, a full-blooded skeptic, was willing to traipse through the grass with me. Ayers wondered if he gave a honk on his World War I-era thunder whistle, if it would bring a ship down near us. He blew, and we watched crows scattering - exciting enough for me.

The Rim has attracted others with outrageous ideas, and some succeeded.

Gen. George Crook’s troops in 1872 began construction of a trail connecting Prescott’s Fort Whipple to the west with Fort Apache, a feat of amazing grit at a time

MOGOLLON RIM

when the Rim rated as wild as any place in the Territory. His trail later became the third major road built in northern Arizona.

Today's Rim Road parallels Crook's Trail in some areas and overlaps it in others, such as at Kehl Springs Campground, about 7 miles east of Strawberry, easily recognized by the old-fashioned split-rail fence that surrounds it. Small chevrons nailed to trees mark the overlapping places. Even some of the original blazes that Crook used to mark the way remain, etched high in the bark of the pines. Crook's vision helped win the Apache wars, but the going proved perilous, his successes achieved one ax swing at a time. The Rim doesn't present such danger today, but modern travelers should know that the big rock retains its own temperament, even its own weather.

Conditions might be moderate in, say, Heber, or even at Bear Canyon and Knoll lakes, just north of 300. But venture down to one of the many collision points, places where the outside world rises to meet the Rim, and watch out. The temperature plummets. The clouds drop so low they flatten your hairdo, and the wind might just scoop you up and deposit you into a different area code.

At Fulton Point, at the western intersection of the Rim Road and State 260, offers something like that. Stand at its promontory and gaze down at a mob of ponderosas, a deep green ocean that ripples softly over the miles, interrupted by a brown dot of a ranch clearing here or there, back to the blue mountains, each range defined by a ragged line that grows fainter as it goes, the mist thickening, until finally, the last one is shrouded in silver, the way heaven must look. The beauty will capture you. It does anyone who breathes oxygen.

Don't be surprised to find visitors, any time from dawn through the blackest part of night, sitting in a dreamlike state at one promontory or another. Western writer Zane Grey, who wrote several of his books nearby at a cabin on Tonto Creek, once told an interviewer that he liked to sit on the Rim and ponder.

As I stood at Fulton, one hand resting on a pine tree, a terrific wind gusted up, and stout as it was, I felt that tall pine swaying against my hand. At other viewpoints, such as the one below Woods Canyon Lake, you might notice wooden crosses and metal markers nailed to trees by family and friends who gathered to heave a (RIGHT) Sprays of northern mannagrass, foxtail Muhlenbergia and golden columbine edge Tonto Creek.

loved one's ashes over the edge. (The Forest Service discourages this practice.) That's the Rim for you, a chuckling chameleon. Beauty one moment, the threat of eternity the next - but still brimming with life, hidden though it might be.

Payson author Marguerite Noble, writing in Arizona Highways in June 1984, told of a roaming cowboy who entered a Rim cave some time back and found a pot of beans. Archaeologists figured they might've been a thousand years old. Incredibly, when planted, the beans grew on trailing vines 10 feet long, and were edible and tasty.

The Rim Road is ever-changing, too. The first 45 miles, flat and good, appear suitable in dry weather for an ordinary passenger car. Where 300 crosses 260, pass through the visitors center parking lot and continue east on FR 171. Just over 2 miles beyond Fulton, the road stops, and drivers

MOGOLLON RIM

must pick up Forest Service Road 512 north to 260, then go east 6 miles to a marked right turn that brings them back to 300.

Taking FR 512 south leads off the Rim, over Valentine Ridge and down to Young, 21 miles distant on a two-lane gravel road. (The original historic route is not passable by car today, but old-timers tell stories of drivers braving it in the early 1920s, incredibly, in Model T Fords. Local ranchers kept pine logs stacked at the side of the road. A driver stopped, roped a few logs to the back bumper of his Ford to slow his progress on the steep downhill grade and took his chances.) Today the Rim Road deteriorates considerably beyond Fulton and just past the Deer Springs fire lookout where the dirt surface takes on tremendous ruts and holes, necessitating at least a high-clearance vehicle. Its route follows the northern boundary of the White Mountain Apache Reservation, along the border fence through forests of pines, firs, aspens and blue spruces, over ridges alive with squirrels and elk, and through meadows wide and still, save for the flight of Mexican blue jays.

Despite emphatic denials by government experts, some locals believe that wolves still roam Apache territory along Carrizo and Cibecue ridges. Those who make the claim the Apache cowboys who used to work that land - should know. If true, how fitting that these great and terrible predators of the forest should make their last stand right under the Rim.

This second portion of the road, beginning at Fulton, runs 49 miles to State Route 60, then continues another 11 miles to Lakeside. As for the Rim itself, it gradually flattens as you move east, and by trip's end it's practically lost amid the trees. But the pleasures of the journey do not disappear with it.

The drive offers many forest havens where visitors can hike, play or daydream. Try lying on your back on a soft bed of pine needles and gazing up. The light looks different. The trees mesmerize. The sky through the branches forms a patchwork quilt in the deepest blue you've ever seen.

Draw in a breath of the delicious air. Then maybe you'll come to understand the Rim's emotional pull.

Additional Reading:

Arizona's Mogollon Rim ($10.95) and The Mogollon Rim hiking map ($4.95) will guide you through Rim country with photographs and detailed information on recreational sites and opportunities. Both are published by Arizona Highways. To order, call toll-free (800) 543-5432, (602) 712-2000 in the Phoenix area or outside the U.S., or online at www.arizonahighways.com.

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