Apache Trail's centennial takes a look back in time

Celebration slated for Oct. 7, 2005

By Kimberly Hosey
For the East Valley Tribune

The Apache Trail turns 100 next month, and people from around the state are coming to celebrate.

Jodi Akers has lived in Apache Junction for more than 40 years, and remembers traveling Apache Trail, also known as state Route 88, with her father, and the family's boat bumping along behind a camper on the dusty road.

"I always loved that," said Akers, owner and founder of Apache Trail Tours. "I saw that they had Jeep tours in Scottsdale, and I figured we have much more scenery and history here, it would work even better."

Akers worked with the Superstition Mountain Historical Society to plan the centennial celebration with proceeds going to the Superstition Mountain Museum. Speakers at the event will include Gov. janet Napolitano, leaders of the historical society and Pinal County Supervisor Sandie Smith.

Akers' tour business has been introducing people to Apache Trail, the Superstition Mountains and the surrounding history for about 12 years. She also will speak at the ceremony.

"I just want to preserve history. Too much gets lost along the way," she said.

The celebration commemorates the completion of rad construction in 1905. The history of the trail itself is much older. Its known heritage goes back to A.D. 900, when Salado Indians, whose cliff dwellings are still visible in the superstition wilderness, used the trail as a footpath to reach the Salt River Valley. When the Roosevelt Dam was authorized by Theodore Roosevelt, the road was built to transport materials for the dam.

"The trail was instrumental in our development," akers said. "If the Apache Trail had not been built, we would have no Roosevelt Dam. If we had no dam, we would have no power and water - and no places to sustain crops or life in the Valley."

The road was first known by various names - Tonto Wagon Road, Mesa-Roosevelt Road, Roosevelt Road. After the road began to see tourists as early as 1906, W. W. Watson, a railroad promoter, coined the name Apache Trail.

Some of the Apache Trail's attractions are invisible. A Burger King now sits on the site of the birth site of Apache Junction. In 1922, George Cleveland Curtis, a traveling salesman from Utah, pitched his tent at the junction of the Apache Trail and the Phoenix-Globe Highway.

His vision for a rest stop soon evolved into a vision for a city at the foot of the Superstition Mountains as he realized the economic potential for the area.

Apache Train is the most ancient highway in North America, Akers said. It was named Arizona's first historic highway in 1987.

'It's funny, people from all over the world are fascinated with the history of Apache Trail," Akers said. "But people who drive on it every day sometimes never look at it."

The 135-mile circular route formed when the Apache Trail was linked with U.S. 60. It begins and ends in Apache Junction and is home to mountains, cliff dwellings, lake shores, old mining towns and eroded canyons.

"we're interested in every aspect of the area's history: people, geology, flora and fauna, paleontology," said George Johnston, president of the Superstition Mountain Historical Society. The museum, he added, is a 'gateway' to that history.