To the White Mountain Apache the peak is Dzil Ligai Si'an, the White Mountain — one of four sacred mountains that bound their world, the home of the wind and of the Ga'an, the mountain spirits. Medicine men face it to pray. All the winds on earth, the old teaching holds, began here. Other maps call it Mount Baldy and measure it at just over 11,400 feet, the second-highest summit in Arizona after the San Francisco Peaks — an extinct stratovolcano gone quiet two million years ago and worn bare above the treeline.
You can climb most of it. The West and East Baldy trails leave the high meadows south of Show Low and follow the two forks of the Little Colorado River up through spruce, fir, and alpine grass to a saddle around 11,200 feet. There the trail ends at a line of rock and a sign, because the true summit lies inside the Fort Apache Reservation and is closed to everyone but tribal members. The mountain is not a peak with a summit register. It is a sacred place that happens to be beautiful, and the boundary near the top is a firm one — a distinction a few hikers still try to argue with the maps, and shouldn't.
The tribe has protected its side as a tribal wilderness since the 1960s, made permanent in the 1990s; the Forest Service manages the eastern slope as the Mount Baldy Wilderness. In winter the same high country becomes Sunrise Park Resort, the ski area the White Mountain Apache own and run themselves across three peaks — the rare case of a sacred landscape making a living for the people to whom it is sacred, on their own terms. Come in summer for the meadows and the cold headwater streams; come in winter for the snow. Either way, understand whose mountain you are on.
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