What it means
The Beeline is State Route 87, and in the Valley it is less a road than a direction: up. It leaves the northeast edge of Mesa, crosses the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, runs past the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, climbs through the Tonto National Forest below Four Peaks and tops out in Payson, the gateway to the Mogollon Rim. “We’re taking the Beeline up Friday” means a cabin, a lake or a campsite, and probably a 6 a.m. alarm.
For Scottsdale it is close at hand. Drive Shea Boulevard east through Fountain Hills and Shea simply ends at the Beeline. Turn south and the Bush Highway exit takes you to Saguaro Lake, the lower Salt River and the wild horses; turn north and the pines are about an hour away. The day trips guide and the summer playbook both start here.
Where you’ll meet it
On summer Friday traffic reports, in directions to Saguaro Lake and the Four Peaks trailheads, in fire-season road closures, and on Sunday afternoons in July when the southbound lanes stop.
Where the word came from
Before the Beeline, the way to the lakes and the high country from the East Valley was slow. The road followed the Salt River, along the route now called the Bush Highway, and the way north to Payson was unpaved.
In the early 1950s Jim Hart, a Maricopa County supervisor, set out to change that with the regional chamber of commerce. He negotiated a diagonal right-of-way across tribal land, from McDowell Road and Country Club Drive in Mesa to the Bush Highway, a shortcut that ran straight for the Saguaro Lake turnoff and saved about 15 minutes. A road that went straight from one point to another made a beeline, and the shortcut became the Beeline Highway. Nobody is on record as the person who first said it; the name belongs to the project, and it spread to the whole route north.
Crews then pushed the road through the canyons toward Payson, dynamiting rock and living in camps along the way. On July 19, 1958, the ribbon was cut in Payson for a paved two-lane highway, and the Arizona Republic announced that Payson was connected to the outside world. The state designated SR 87 to Payson the next year. Hart did not see much of what followed: he was killed in a one-car crash near Shea Boulevard on February 6, 1960, on the road he had championed.
What it is not
It is not the Apache Trail, the older, partly unpaved and far more dramatic road from Apache Junction past Roosevelt Lake. And it is not all of SR 87: the number runs south toward Chandler and north past Payson to Winslow, but only the Mesa-to-Payson stretch is the Beeline.
The fine print
The modern road is the product of decades of widening. The 1958 highway had no passing lanes for another ten years. By 1983 nearly half of it had three or four lanes, and between 1995 and 2001 a $170 million project built a four-lane divided highway the whole way, with the final bridge and realignment finished in 2001. A grade-separated interchange replaced the dangerous Bush Highway intersection in 2008. Arizona Highways puts today’s drive at about an hour and ten minutes, roughly half what it took in the 1980s.
The road carries several official names locals ignore. In 1996 the stretch from Shea Boulevard to Payson became the Duthie-Martin Highway, after Gib Duthie and Robert Martin, officers who died working on it. The Rim Country Museum says the route was renamed the Beeline Scenic Parkway in 2003. Neither has displaced the old word.
The land matters too. The Beeline crosses two sovereign nations: the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community near Mesa and the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation along the Verde River, where the old army post of Camp McDowell stood. Hart’s shortcut was possible only because he negotiated for it, and the casino, the gas stations and the Fort McDowell turnoff you pass are on their land, not Maricopa County’s. Near Mount Ord the highway reaches its high point, a saddle at about 4,565 feet, before dropping into Payson.