Apache-Sitgreaves: The Mogollon Rim's Hidden Edge

The Mogollon Rim is one of the most dramatic geological features in Arizona, and one of the least known. A two-hundred-mile escarpment running roughly northwest to southeast across the center of the state, it marks the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, dropping precipitously in places by two thousand feet from the plateau surface to the desert basin below. Zane Grey, who wrote dozens of novels about the American West, kept a cabin near Payson and used the Rim country as the setting for several of his most commercially successful books. The Rim gave him what he needed: verticality, pine forest, isolation, and a landscape that looked the way the American West was supposed to look.

Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, a combined administrative unit covering roughly two and three-quarter million acres, runs along the Rim from the White Mountains east to the New Mexico border. The Sitgreaves portion preserves the high plateau country above the escarpment; the Apache portion covers the White Mountain highlands, including some of the highest terrain in Arizona, with peaks above ten thousand feet.

The White Mountain Apache Tribe holds the Fort Apache Reservation immediately adjacent to the forest, and the ecological and cultural relationships between the reservation and the national forest are not cleanly separable. Apache families have hunted, gathered, and managed these forests for centuries. The tribe today operates the White Mountain Apache Cultural Center and Museum at Fort Apache, documenting a history that begins long before the national forest designation.

The forest's streams, fed by heavy mountain snowpack, flow into the Salt and Little Colorado Rivers. The water that irrigates Phoenix and the Phoenix metro area began, in part, on the plateau above the Mogollon Rim.