big man tips

MILITARY SINKHOLE TRAIL View from the Rim Lakes Vista Trail About halfway up the Military Sinkhole Trail, I thought of Michael Corleone. In a memorable scene from the 1972 film The Godfather, protagonist Corleone rebuffed a ride as he approached his ancestral Sicilian village for the first time, deciding to savor the experience by walking to it instead. I get it. Mixed conifer woodlands on Military Sinkhole There�s a sort of reverence associated with trekking to special places. A slower, boots-on-the-ground pace syncs well with epic experiences. Like the village of Corleone, the Mogollon Rim is a place best crept up to on foot. Arizona Thistle grow in Rim-top meadows The Rim is a roughly 200-mile escarpment at the edge of the Colorado Plateau that runs east-west across central Arizona.   It�s easy enough to drive right up to its precipitous cliffs and take an edgy, 40+-mile motor tour along Rim Road 300, but to get a better sense of the scale and structure of this geological wonde...

Highline Trail Hike Highlights VOAz Restoration Efforts Dude Creek flows over the Highline Trail Volunteers for Outdoor Arizona project manager Paul Paonessa has a name for the pre-rehabilitated condition of the Highline Trail #31: SOLPOST. The sobriquet, which was originally concocted by Woody Keen, former director of the Professional Trail Builders Association, is an acronym for �Scar On The Land Piece of S*#t Trail.� Those who have trekked certain sections of the path that runs below the Mogollon Rim north of Payson prior to 2017 will agree---that pretty much sums it up. A section of new alignment of the Highline Trail The historic route was cut back in the late 1800s as a travel corridor to connect homesteads and communities around the towns of Payson and Pine. The 51-mile course began to lose value when the Civilian Conservation Corps built Forest Road 64 (Control Road) in the 1930s. This posh-by-comparison road provided an alternative to the randomly built, precariously situated ...

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...

RED ROCK SPRING to GERONIMO TRAILHEAD Tonto National Forest Red Rock Spring Water is the life force of the forest. In Arizona, where water is too often in short supply, the forests have some creative ways of storing and distributing the precious liquid. An example of a natural water system can be observed near the base of the Mogollon Rim near Pine. Beneath the imposing, vertical cliffs that mark the edge of the Colorado Plateau, numerous springs provide reliable water sources for wildlife and long distance hikers. The springs are charged when melting snow and rainfall on the 7,000-foot escarpment, soaks through the porous rocks emerging hundreds of feet below as gushing waterfalls (Horton Spring) oozing seeps (Dripping Spring) and trickling fountains like those encountered on a hike from Forest Road 64 to the Geronimo Trailhead. Using Red Rock Trail #294 and part of Highline Trail #31, this customizable, water-themed trek visits two springs and a creek on its way through scrubby foot...