Coronado Trail Scenic Byway — US-191

Welcome to the Coronado Trail — U.S. Highway One-Ninety-One — one of the wildest, loneliest, twistiest scenic drives in all of America. I'm Ranger Quinn, and I'll ride the whole crooked length of it with you. Along fo…

Driving the Coronado — Read This First — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

Nutrioso and the high volcanic meadows of the White Mountains — elk country in the second-largest ponderosa forest on earth.

Four Climate Zones in Ninety Miles — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

As we climb up onto the White Mountains, you're rolling through one of the finest high forests in the Southwest — tall ponderosa pines whose bark smells of vanilla and butterscotch in the sun, giving way higher up to…

A Landscape Built by Fire — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

Escudilla, Arizona's third-highest peak — where Aldo Leopold saw the last grizzly killed and began to father the idea of wilderness.

The Ponderosa Belt — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

This whole grand road is named for a man who came through this country nearly five hundred years ago chasing a dream of gold — and found only heartbreak. It was fifteen forty. Word had raced through Spanish Mexico of…

The Aspens & the Largest Organism — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

How the Coronado Trail was built — 460 curves hand-cut by CCC crews along the mountain spine, the crookedest road in Arizona.

Here is a secret this road would just as soon you did not know. The highway you are driving this very minute — the Coronado Trail — carried another name and another number for most of its life. It used to be U.S. Rout…

The Monsoon — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

We're rolling through the high heart of Arizona's White Mountains now — and if this doesn't look like the Arizona in your head, that's the wonder of it. No saguaros, no red rock up here: instead, cool green forests of…

Birds of the High Country — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

Here, at nearly nine thousand feet, is Hannagan Meadow — a beautiful, hushed mountain meadow ringed by dark spruce forest, with a historic log lodge that's been welcoming travelers on this lonely road for a century. T…

This Is Apache Country — Then and Now — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

Look at the forest through here and you'll start to notice whole hillsides of standing dead trees — silver skeletons — with a green fuzz of new growth and young aspen rising beneath them. You're driving through a burn…

Living With Fire — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

The cold, clear streams tumbling out of these White Mountains are the last wild home of a fish found naturally nowhere else on Earth: the Apache trout, Arizona's state fish. It's a beautiful creature — golden-yellow f…

What Comes Back First — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

Now here is the most important story on this whole road — a small, quiet thing that happened right in these mountains over a hundred years ago and changed the way an entire country sees wild land. It is the story of a…

Elk, Bear, and the Big Animals — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

For these next long miles you're skirting the edge of the Blue Range — one of the last great pieces of true wilderness in the American Southwest, hundreds of thousands of roadless acres of rugged mountain and deep can…

The Blue and the Country Below — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

Let's talk about the road itself, because it's a legend among drivers. The Coronado Trail is famous as one of the crookedest, curviest, least-traveled federal highways in the entire United States — the people who coun…

Into the Switchbacks — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

Rose Peak's fire lookout — a century-old solitary vigil over the wildest, most switchbacked stretch of the Blue Range.

The Woman on Rose Peak — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

Pull in here at Blue Vista — and prepare yourself, because this is the great view of the whole drive. You're standing right on the edge of the Mogollon Rim, the giant escarpment that splits Arizona in two, and the who…

The View from Blue Vista — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

So you have heard how a young Aldo Leopold helped kill the wolves of these mountains, and how it turned him around. Now let me give you the other half of it — the half with an ending — because it is happening out ther…

Open Range & the Ranching Country — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

Look out at these blue mountains and bottomless canyons, because you are driving through the last free homeland of the Apache, and the country of one of the most famous names in the American West. This broken maze —…

We're riding high above the Blue Range and the Blue River country now — some of the wildest, least-roaded land left in the whole American Southwest — and it is alive with animals, including a couple you might not expe…

Where the Water Goes — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

Hold on to the wheel, because now the road earns its wild reputation — this is the great descent, mile after mile of tight, stacked switchbacks corkscrewing down off the Mogollon Rim. Take it low and slow, use the pul…

Pinyon, Juniper & the Middle Country — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

K.P. Cienega — a hidden spring-fed meadow in the heart of Mexican gray wolf recovery country, where the lobo runs wild again.

Here's the single most remarkable thing about the drive you're taking — and almost nobody realizes it. In these ninety miles, from the high forested crest down to the desert floor at Clifton, you pass through very nea…

Arriving in the Desert — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

The San Francisco River canyon and the Apache homeland — a stronghold of hidden folds held longer than almost any land in America.

And here we come out of the high country at last, into the hot, rugged, cactus-studded desert canyons of the San Francisco River country — a whole different world from the cool meadows up top. It's dry and stony and d…

How Copper Actually Gets Made — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

The Mine You Can See From Space — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

Look at that vast terraced canyon opening up beside the road — the Morenci mine — and let me tell you what it took to dig it, because it is a tale of American muscle and American grit and no small amount of American h…

The River That Kept Coming Back — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

Clifton's jail, blasted straight into the cliff in 1881 — and the mason who carved it became its very first inmate.

Clifton — the Town in the Canyon — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.

And there it is — and I promise you've never seen anything quite like it. This is Morenci, home to one of the largest open-pit copper mines in all of North America. Look at it: a man-made canyon miles across and thous…

And we come to rest down in Clifton, the old copper town tucked into the narrow canyon of the San Francisco River — a weathered, hardscrabble, history-soaked place of old brick storefronts, a cliffside jail blasted ou…