Most folks start out by making the turn northeast onto State Road 88 (the Apache Trail, Idaho Road) at Apache Junction. This area is Sonoran Desert uplands at their finest. Along the way you'll pass three beautiful desert lakes, two major wilderness areas and enough yucca, saguaro, ocotillo and prickly pear to last a few lifetimes. Today's Apache Trail Historic Road is a 42-mile route, half-paved, half white-knuckle, washboard dirt with a hair-raising descent at Fish Creek Hill that would do any modern roller coaster justice. It was Roosevelt Dam and Theodore Roosevelt Lake (as part of the Salt River Project) that made modern Phoenix possible. But an actual drivable road had to be built in the early 1900's to facilitate the construction of Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River. When the first "Americans" arrived, they were mostly looking for gold around here and found it both to the east and to the west, so they built a connecting wagon road that followed the ancient Indian pony trail. The Tonto Trail had been used for hundreds of years by Native Americans as they traveled back and forth between the Mogollon Rim uplands and the Valley of the Sun. The Apache Trail was built in 1905 along the route of the historic Tonto Trail.
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