The San Francisco River canyon and the Apache homeland — a stronghold of hidden folds held longer than almost any land in America.
As the great descent carries you down out of the pines, the country turns rugged and dry, and somewhere below you runs the San Francisco River, threading its canyon down toward the Gila. This was Apache homeland — the Western Apache and the Chiricahua, who knew every spring and hidden canyon in this country and held it against all comers longer than almost any people in America. It was in rough mountains like these, to the south, that Geronimo and his band held out to the very end, and the land tells you why: a country of hidden folds and sudden canyons, easy to defend and hard to cross. Watch the change out your windows — the ponderosa giving way to juniper and piñon, then to the ocotillo and cactus of the desert. In a single afternoon's drive you've come down through country it would take a naturalist a thousand miles of latitude to cross. Heads up through here: the road hairpins back on itself in tight switchbacks — take them slow, hug your lane, and use the pullouts to let anyone behind you go by.