A Day Trip

Forry has been reading a series of articles in the Sunday Arizona Republic about car trips in the Phoenix area. He had read about a loop that would take us north and east on Arizona Highway 88 up to Tortilla Flat. The road covers the same area as the fabled Lost Dutchman Mine.

 The whole area is criss-crossed with saquaros and cholla cacti -- and lots of power lines!

The hills in this area are covered with bands of lichens. They follow the strata of the layers in the rocks. It looks like they are striped...

Highway 88 is classified as an Arizona Scenic Highway. It lives up to its billing. As you head north, you come upon Apache Lake, the first of a string of lakes behind the dams on the Salt River.

And also the first of the seven "one lane" wide bridges on the trip --

 

The scenery just keeps getting more spectacular as we head up through the Sierra  Ancha --

By now, the pavement is gone! The next thirty plus miles are all dirt road.

Some of it is pretty wide and the recent run-off has been graded to the side. But it's pretty "wash-boardy" in places...

 And full of turns and twists -- and switchbacks! This is what the road looked like on the GPS!

And it gets pretty narrow as we get towards the bottom. Take a look at those guard rails!

Many of the side canyons are pretty rugged --

Love the colors!

After miles of dirt roads, we came to Theodore Roosevelt Lake. The water level in all of the reservoirs is quite low, evidence of the continuing drought in the Southwest.

This is the dam in the canyon at the foot of Roosevelt Lake.

You no longer (since 9-11) can drive over the top of the dam. The road turns back on itself, then becomes Highway 188 and crosses over this beautiful bridge.

We drove back towards the northeast along the shores of the lake towards Punkin Center to where Hwy 188 joined up with Hwy 87, the highway that eventually ends up back at Eagle View RV Resort.

We got back to Auntie Violet just as it was getting dark. We had planned to eat out on the way back, but decided we'd rather eat at home than drive these roads in the dark.