“Yes, but we were planning an entirely different trip. Arizona and New Mexico, the Rainbow Bridge, then north to Yellowstone and Glacier Park.”
“Well, it’s lucky I saw you in time. You go straight to Needles,—you can’t miss the road, marked all the way. Good-by and good luck. You’ll like California.”
Like Jacob with the angel they wrestled with us and would not let us go. After several such encounters, we learned to recognize the Native Son at sight, and when he opened with “Going to California?” we would reply, with the courage of our mendacity, “Just left.” It saved us hours daily.
CHAPTER IX
TWENTY PER CENT GRADES, FORTY PER CENT VANILLA.
COMPLICATIONS arose when we reached Tucson. We planned to see endless places but most of them, at an altitude of a half mile to a mile and a half, could be reached only by roads still under ten feet of snow. The district ridged by the White Mountains was completely cut off, its unbridged rivers flooded, and its few highways covered by snow-drifts thrice the height of a man. The same conditions prevailed from Flagstaff to Winslow, and while Southern Arizona picked oranges and basked in the sun, the Grand Canyon was in the grip of winter. It became necessary, therefore, to find a ranch in which to hibernate for a month, till Arizona highways became less like the trains in the time table Beatrice Hereford describes, where “those that start don’t get there, and those that get there don’t start.”
Tucson being apparently devoid of “dude” ranches, we decided to move on to the center of the state until we found what we sought. The shorter and more obvious route by the Old Spanish Trail, through Florence to Chandler and Phoenix, we discarded for the “new state highway” to Winkleman and Globe, thence over the Apache Trail to the Roosevelt Dam, and Chandler. Globe maintains all contact with the world by the Apache Trail: in the huge, irregular quadrilateral between Globe and Phoenix, through which the Mescal and Pinal ranges stray, there is no other road. The difficulty of travel in Arizona is not that the state has no roads, as has been unjustly claimed, but that the roads make no pretense of linking together the widely scattered towns.
We had one other reason for taking the Apache Trail besides its widely advertised beauty. Everyone who mentioned it spoke in bated breath of its difficulty, “the steepest and most dangerous road in Arizona,—you two women surely can’t mean to go over it alone? It’s dangerous even for a man.”
Whatever inward qualms these remarks evoked, they made us only more curious to try our luck. We had already learned that taken a car-length at a time, no road is as bad as it seems in toto, and few situations develop which admit of no solution. As for doing without a man, we found Providence always sent what we needed, in any crisis we could not meet ourselves. In Tucson we found two old friends, Miss Susan and Miss Martha, who shared our brash confidence in ourselves enough to consent to go with us as far as Phoenix.
One can travel north from Phoenix to the Dam, then east to Globe, or reverse the route. Most people consider the Trail more magnificent going north and east, but circumstances forced us to take the opposite course. A month later, we made the reverse journey, so that we had opportunity to judge both for ourselves. It is hard to weigh splendor against splendor. No matter which direction you take, you will be constantly looking back to snatch the glory behind you, but on the whole, if I could travel the Apache Trail but once, I should start from Phoenix.