MILK RANCH POINT
MILK RANCH POINT Pine-Strawberry Highline Trail Back in the 1880s, Rial Allen ran cattle along the East Verde River and operated a dairy on Milk Ranch Point. The Mormon settler, who was also a founder of the town of Pine, produced cheese, butter and milk for the locals and crews working on the Atlantic & Pacific railroad. The Allen family left the area in 1891 and today, there�s nary a trace of the dairy that helped sustain waves of hardy pioneers who came to establish communities in the Tonto Basin. Milk Ranch Point promontory, which hovers above the hamlets of Pine-Strawberry, is part of the Mogollon Rim, a 200-mile uplifted shelf that marks the division of the Colorado Plateau and Arizona�s Basin and Range zone. The imposing geological feature is a scaffold of pine and fossiliferous sediments squeezed into fractured vertical cliffs that rise to over 7000 feet. There are two popular ways to get to the wind-ravaged peninsula---the hard way and the harder way. With a ve...