The Ponderosa Belt — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.
You're in ponderosa pine now, and this is worth stopping the car for at some point, because ponderosa is one of the great trees of the American West and it has a party trick.
Find a big one — orange-plated bark, tall and straight, branches only near the top. Put your nose right into a crack in that bark, in the sun, and breathe in. It smells of vanilla. Or butterscotch. Nobody entirely agrees, and people will argue about it in a way that's very endearing. It's real, it's the resin warming, and once you've done it you'll do it at every pull-off for the rest of the day.
The bark itself tells you the tree's age: young ponderosas have dark, almost black, furrowed bark and are called blackjacks; the mature ones turn that beautiful orange-cinnamon and the plates get big enough to peel off in pieces shaped like jigsaw puzzle bits.
Arizona holds the largest continuous ponderosa pine forest on earth, running along the Mogollon Rim just west of here. It's a fire-adapted forest — those thick plates and high branches evolved to survive frequent, gentle ground fires. Which becomes very important later today, when we get to what happened in two thousand eleven.