The Apache Trail: Dynamite, Scenery, and a Road That Kills People Every Few Years

State Route Eighty-Eight, the Apache Trail, is twenty-two miles of gravel road through the Superstition Wilderness and the Salt River canyon that the Arizona Department of Transportation and Tonto National Forest both acknowledge as one of the most dangerous roads in the state. The unpaved section, between Fish Creek Hill and Roosevelt Dam, is a single-lane dirt road cut into canyon walls with significant drop-offs and no guardrails on most of it. Theodore Roosevelt called it the most spectacular road in America when he drove it in nineteen eleven to dedicate the dam.

The road follows a route the Yavapai and Apache used for centuries through the canyon system. When the Bureau of Reclamation needed to move construction materials to the Roosevelt Dam site at the beginning of the twentieth century, it built a supply road along existing desert travel corridors. The construction crews blasted sections of the canyon wall to create the roadbed. The result was a road that worked for wagon trains in nineteen oh seven and that still works, most of the time, for passenger vehicles in the twenty-first century.

The Superstition Mountains, visible from most of the Trail, have accumulated a legendary geography over the past century and a half. The Lost Dutchman's gold mine, a story attached to a German immigrant named Jacob Waltz in the eighteen eighties, has sent hundreds of people into the Superstitions. Several have died in the search. The mine, if it ever existed, has never been found.

Tonto National Forest's Fish Creek Canyon is the most dramatic section of the road. The canyon walls rise a thousand feet. The road is carved into them. There is nowhere to turn around.