Why This Road Exists

Here's something worth knowing as you wind up this improbable road: it was never meant to be a scenic drive at all. It was built for one hard, practical reason — to tame a river and build a dam.

Back at the turn of the twentieth century, the young city of Phoenix, out in the desert to the west, had a water problem. The Salt River that fed it was wild and unreliable — devastating floods one year, bone-dry drought the next — and the farmers and townsfolk knew that to make the desert bloom for good, they had to catch and store that water. So the brand-new federal reclamation program took on one of its very first projects: a great dam, way up the Salt River, deep in these mountains, at a place called Roosevelt. But to build a dam in a roadless wilderness of canyons, you first have to get there — you have to haul in cement and steel and machinery and men. And so, before the dam, they had to carve a road: this road, the Apache Trail, cut through solid rock in the early nineteen-hundreds just to reach the dam site. Boone will tell you how, and by whose hands. The dam got built, the river got tamed into this staircase of lakes, and Phoenix grew into a great city on the water they stored. And the freight road they'd punched through the mountains to do it turned out to be so spectacular that people just... kept driving it, for the beauty. And here you are, still driving it today. Roll on.