How the Coronado Trail was built — 460 curves hand-cut by CCC crews along the mountain spine, the crookedest road in Arizona.
Take a moment to appreciate the sheer audacity of the road under your tires. When it was pushed through in the nineteen-twenties, this route — the old US Six-Sixty-Six, the 'Devil's Highway' — was one of the most ambitious mountain roads ever cut in the Southwest. It climbs and drops thousands of feet, and it's said to bend through more than four hundred and sixty curves along its length, which earns it the title of the crookedest road in Arizona and one of the least-driven paved roads in America. Much of it was carved out by hand, and by crews of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the nineteen-thirties — young men with picks and dynamite, notching a ribbon of pavement along the very spine of the mountains. There's almost no traffic, barely a town, and no cell signal for a hundred miles. That isn't a flaw; it's the whole point. You have this magnificent, twisting road very nearly to yourself.