This is the final post in my little mini-series. You can find the others here:
https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/post-your-photos/234754-travel-apache-tra...illa-flat.html https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/post-your-photos/234911-travel-apache-tra...ish-creek.html
After bottoming out at the Fish Creek canyon, the trail slowly winds up and back to the Salt River. The Salt River is key source of water for the Phoenix metro area. This is Apache Lake, which is part of the Salt River.
The road stays pretty high up the river for the next several miles, going up and down and all around a series of dizzying switchbacks before finally settling down right by the river, staying there until the end.
Somebody had spent some time impaling the riverbed with sticks here.
The water is a welcome sight in 110° weather. Easy on the eyes, pleasant on the feet.
Did I mention that the trail was dusty? My car isn't normally brown.
Shortly after the road levels out at the river, it arrives at the Roosevelt Dam. The river walls rise up sharply on either side; there's a reason they put the dam here.
This is the Theodore Roosevelt Dam. At 357 feet high, it holds back the largest lake in Arizona. Of couse, Mead and Powell are bigger, but we share those lakes with Nevada and Utah, respectively.
You might think the dam was named as a dedication to the man after he died, but he was very much alive at the time. In fact, ol' Teddy was in office when the dam was started in 1905, and had only just left when it was completed in 1911. It's a very old dam.
Unlike the Hoover Dam, which was made from concrete, the Roosevelt dam was built the old-fashioned way: from bricks and mortar. It didn't get its modern concrete surface until the 1990's, but its masonry core remains.
Courtesy of Wikimedia, here's how it looked in 1913:
A fragment of the dam's old surface can bee seen in the lower-right of this picture. Those three trucks parked at the bottom of the dam give you a good sense of the scale of it. Can you imagine how many bricks it took to build this?
This bridge takes Highway 188 over the lake just before the dam. It was built as part of the dam renovation project in the early 90's. The Apache Trail ends right there at Highway 188, where Globe is 30 miles to the right, and Payson is 50 miles to the left. Aside from a boat launch, there's not much between here and there.
Thanks for coming with me on this trip. I hope you enjoyed it! I sure did.
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