The edge of the Mogollon Rim on the homelands of the Western Apache, seen from a bare shelf of pale orange sandstone with ponderosa growing right to the drop along the right of the frame. Below the rim, unbroken conifer forest runs out over low hills to hazy ranges on the horizon, and a two-lane highway threads through the trees in the middle distance, doubling back on itself as it climbs toward the rim.
Richard N Horne / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Arizona · Region

The Mogollon Rim & the White Mountains

The great forested escarpment and the Apache high country — the long wall of the Mogollon Rim, the alpine White Mountains, the plunge of Salt River Canyon, and the Coronado Trail, on the homelands of the Western Apache.

6 places to explore

Halfway up Arizona the ground simply ends and starts again a thousand feet higher. The Mogollon Rim is the abrupt southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, a forested wall running two hundred miles across the state, and above it lies the high country most visitors never reach — ponderosa and aspen, trout streams, the alpine White Mountains where Arizona keeps its coldest winters and its summer refuge from the desert. Mount Baldy, the range's sacred summit, belongs to the White Mountain Apache, who run the Sunrise ski area on their own land at Fort Apache.

This is Apache country — the Ndee, the people — and its history is among the hardest in the state. In 1872 the government drew the San Carlos reservation south of the Salt River and ran it as a holding pen, forcing Chiricahua, Yavapai, and band after band of Western Apache onto ground so bad with heat and disease it earned the name Hell's Forty Acres — part of a deliberate strategy, General Crook's, of penning rival peoples together. The Apache Wars ran out of these mountains, and the fight over them isn't finished: at Oak Flat, above the old copper town of Superior, the San Carlos Apache are still fighting a foreign mining company for a stand of oak and petroglyph ground they hold sacred.

The roads here are the reward for the climb. US-60 drops off the Rim into the Salt River Canyon in a stack of switchbacks — the little Grand Canyon, the gorge that separates the White Mountain and San Carlos Apache lands — and hauls back out the far wall. Farther east, the Coronado Trail, US-191, corkscrews a hundred lonely miles from Springerville down to the Clifton copper pits, the least-driven paved road in the state, named for the 1540 expedition that came through hunting cities of gold and left empty-handed. The desert gets the visitors. The high country gets the ones who keep coming back.

What to See in The Mogollon Rim & the White Mountains

6 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

Mount Baldy

Greer

Dzil Ligai Si'an, the sacred White Mountain, and the summit you stop short of

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US-60 descending into Salt River Canyon, shot into a low sun with heavy lens flare across the frame — the highway curving through a hairpin with guardrail along its outer edge and a single pale pickup on the bend, another length of the road visible against the far wall. Brushy slopes fall away on both sides and hazy ridges close the canyon behind. The Salt River itself, and the boundary it draws between the White Mountain and San Carlos Apache nations, are not visible in the frame.

Salt River Canyon

Globe

US-60's switchback plunge into the gorge that divides two Apache nations

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Historic Sites

Casa Malpais

Springerville

The Mogollon great house on the lava, and the catacombs sealed back shut

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Buildings of the Fort Apache and Theodore Roosevelt School historic district, on White Mountain Apache land — in the foreground a single-storey stone building with a deep porch on green-painted posts, a panelled door and a tall arched window; beyond it a two-storey block of coursed red-brown sandstone under a shingled hipped roof, with a brick chimney and a small cupola. A timber boardwalk crosses the foreground and bare cottonwoods stand under an overcast sky. The Army post became a federal Indian boarding school in 1923; the Tribe has managed the site since 2007.

Fort Apache Historic Park

Whiteriver

The Army fort that became a boarding school — and came back to the Apache

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Towns & Gateways

Oak Flat

Superior

Chi'chil Bildagoteel — the Apache sacred ground a copper mine is set to swallow

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Show Low

Show Low

The Rim-country town a losing hand of cards named

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Stories from The Mogollon Rim & the White Mountains

Nature

The Roof That Waters the Desert

Arizona's driest cities drink from its coldest, highest corner — the volcanic White Mountains atop the Mogollon Rim, where the snow that becomes the Salt and the Little Colorado gathers on a peak the White Mountain Apache hold sacred, then runs down through a two-thousand-foot canyon into the desert below.

5 min read

The Mogollon Rim & the White Mountains rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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