What it means
The Apache Trail is State Route 88, the road that leaves Apache Junction at the foot of the Superstitions and climbs 40 miles through the mountains to Theodore Roosevelt Dam. Say it in Scottsdale and two things are understood: that you mean a day trip, and that you mean the scary part. The first 18 miles, past Goldfield, the Lost Dutchman trailheads and Canyon Lake to the six-person hamlet of Tortilla Flat, are paved and pleasant. Beyond Tortilla Flat the pavement quits, and the road drops 1,000 feet down Fish Creek Hill on a one-lane gravel shelf with no guardrail and a canyon on the outside. That stretch is what people are describing when they say “we did the Apache Trail” the way other people say “we did Everest.”
It is also the oldest piece of engineering in the East Valley’s story. The road exists because the Roosevelt Dam needed one, and the dam is why the Salt River stopped flooding Phoenix and started filling its canals. The Salt River Project guide carries that history; this page is about the road.
Where you’ll meet it
In the day trips guide, on jeep-tour brochures, in the fall and spring when the weather makes a long drive pleasant, and in the news whenever a flood closes it again. Tortilla Flat’s saloon, with its dollar-bill walls, is the standard turnaround for people in ordinary cars.
Where the word came from
The road came before the name. When the federal Reclamation Service began Roosevelt Dam in 1903, the nearest railhead was Mesa, 60 miles away across mountains with no road at all. Chief engineer Louis Hill hired laborers from the San Carlos Apache Reservation, at $1.50 a day against the $2.00 paid to other workers, and they built the Tonto Wagon Road along an old Native footpath, starting on August 29, 1903. The Apache Junction library’s history puts the finish at September 3, 1905, and the cost at $551,000; the Bureau of Reclamation’s own account says the first 64 miles were usable by December 1904 for about $200,000. The Apache crews were known for dry-laid stone retaining walls, built without mortar, some of which still hold the road up.
Tortilla Flat began in 1904 as a freight stop on that road. Theodore Roosevelt rode it up to dedicate the dam on March 18, 1911, and is credited with saying the drive “combines the grandeur of the Alps, the glory of the Rockies, the magnificence of the Grand Canyon.” Tourism followed. Around 1915 the Southern Pacific Railroad, selling motor tours from its Globe and Phoenix stations, began advertising the road as the “Apache Trail,” and the library credits an agent named E.E. Watson with the phrase. The name stuck to the road, then to the state highway number it got in 1927, and finally to the historic-road designation Arizona conferred at Lost Dutchman State Park on February 25, 1987.
What it is not
It is not a trail. Nothing about it is for walking, and the Apache people did not call it anything; the name is a railroad’s marketing. It is also not the Beeline, the other road out of the East Valley toward the lakes and the Rim, which is paved, fast and dull by comparison.
The fine print
SR 88 originally ran past the dam to Globe; the section east of Roosevelt was renumbered SR 188 on August 20, 1999, so today’s SR 88 ends at the dam. Apache Junction to Canyon Lake was paved in the late 1940s and the pavement now reaches just past Tortilla Flat, about milepost 213. The hard miles are 222 to 229, from the Fish Creek Hill overlook to Apache Lake Marina Road.
Those miles were closed in 2019 after the Woodbury Fire burned the watershed above them and the September remnants of Hurricane Lorena sent floods and a rockslide across the roadbed. ADOT reopened a nine-mile stretch that August, lost it again in September, and then left it shut for five years while it argued about who should pay for a road that serves a handful of residents and a lot of sightseers. The April 2024 fix was a $4 million interim project: regrading, culverts, boulder removal, rockfall mitigation and new signs, with a $33.7 million full rebuild still unfunded. The road reopened in September 2024 to high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicles and UTVs only. Sedans are prohibited, and the restriction is enforced by the grade as much as the signs.
The Apache Trail Historic Road is one of four state-designated historic roads under the Arizona Parkways, Historic and Scenic Roads program. Tortilla Flat, population six at the 2020 census, is the last of the stage stops; the current buildings date from a rebuild after fire in the late 1980s.