Cameron

Three spans mark the Little Colorado crossing at Cameron, and the oldest doesn't carry cars. The nineteen eleven suspension bridge carries a pipeline, and a state report calls it the oldest surviving highway suspension bridge in Arizona. Two spans from two thousand sixteen carry the traffic. They replaced a nineteen fifty-nine truss. The four-lane stretch through town was built with underpasses for people and for livestock, which tells you who else uses this road. Before it was Cameron, the roadside marker says, it was Tanner's Crossing, on the Mormon trail from Utah by way of Lees Ferry to settlements in Arizona and Mexico. The town's named for Ralph Cameron, the county sheriff turned senator from Boone's tale, back on the rim. The Cameron Trading Post stands on Highway eighty-nine, just north of the Highway sixty-four junction. The dining room has a pressed-tin ceiling, a stone fireplace, and Navajo tacos at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the market sells cold drinks, ice and sandwiches to go. Gas is in Cameron too. Ask about the garden behind the post, planted in the nineteen thirties and credited to Hubert Richardson's first wife, Mabel. It has sandstone paths, a fountain, a honeysuckle arbor, and picnic tables cut from slabs of ripple-marked sandstone. Set your lunch down on that, and you're eating off an old ripple in the sand.