The View from Blue Vista — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.
The overlooks along this high stretch are the payoff for all those curves, and this is the biggest view of the day, so pull in if there's space.
You're standing at roughly nine thousand feet on the edge of the Mogollon Rim — the great escarpment that runs diagonally across Arizona and separates the high plateau country from the desert below. From up here the land just falls away, ridge behind ridge behind ridge, blue with distance, and on a clear day you are looking sixty, eighty, a hundred miles into New Mexico and down toward Mexico.
What you are actually looking at, geologically, is the edge of the Colorado Plateau — a vast slab of rock that was lifted thousands of feet and has been eroding backwards ever since. The Rim is that erosional edge, still retreating.
Almost everything in the middle distance is national forest and wilderness with essentially nobody in it. There are no towns down there. At night, if you are up here after dark, there are no lights either — this is some of the darkest sky left in the lower forty-eight, and the Milky Way from these overlooks is genuinely startling.
Take five minutes. It's cold and windy up here even in summer, and it's worth it.