Teddy Roosevelt Lake

What would you expect advertised in the AZ desert, but a topless bar.



Prehistoric looking floodplain...

 SOUTH we leisurely  travel on Arizona state highway 188. 

Since leaving behind the
4 laner 87, we've explored winding blacktop in superb condition, undulating across the low mountains, Anaconda like, drifting through a flooded Amazon tributary, beyond these small settlements, Jake's Corner Bar, Tonto Basin and Punkin Center, rounded a myriad of curves reminiscent of olive skinned, dark eyed, voluptuous Italian movie stars from another era.  Curves and pavement craving another 50 horsepower that I didn't have.



A lone cactus guarding the channel.

We ride up and down gravel tracks overlooking a dry riverbed, onwards to water a few inches deep and narrow enough for even I to jump across, eventually opening into a channel cut deep into muddy flats, flowing amongst dying trees and wide flood plains guarded by a lone Saguaro, to Theodore Roosevelt Lake.



Nude beach, but minus the nudists!



Not exactly the 'lake of shining waters', this man made reservoir like all others I'd seen, seemed perilously low on water, the life blood of all living things...

I was in the Tonto National Forest approaching the Roosevelt Recreation area.



Receding waters.

Coming over the rise was a bare beach, like nudists but without the people... one of dozens I passed. 

As I stopped to take photos with the waterproof Olympus camera that has served me so well since my first European Adventure, I couldn't help but wonder aloud into my helmet shrouded brain... was this the eventual fate of all these desert cities???

What happens when our unquenchable thirst for back yard swimming pools we rarely use, to green lawns and massive golf courses, vegetation foreign to the desert and our need for fueling vast regions of irrigated super farms... what happens when those demands finally drain not only the man made ditches but the Ogallala aquifer of six million year old water.

      
        What then?

Will places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Searchlight and most of the southwest revert back to the Mojave, home only to coyotes, scorpions and rattlesnakes, maybe the occasional Gila monster...



Receding shoreline.

 This inland, man created shallow sea, home today to bass fisherman, party boaters and Jet skiers, would be just another dried up pond, littered with empty Bud light bottles and oil cans.


Now that's a bridge!

 Pondering this thought like a cow chewing it's cud, I pulled into yet another scenic overlook and what do I spot, but a lone rider of a late model Kawasaki KLR 650.  We nod in acknowledgement, he's stowing his camera gear as I retrieve mine, we have a short conversation.  He's from a small community north of Payson, a small city north of the 87/188 junction.  He tells me of some of his favorite rides... I tell him I am taking the Apache Trail.  He nods knowingly in silent agreement.