What is The Path Most Traveled?
If you have driven the Loop 101 through Scottsdale, you have seen this artwork, probably at 65 miles an hour, probably without knowing it had a name.
The Path Most Traveled is the art cast into the sound walls, retention walls and bridge piers of the Pima Freeway where it runs through Scottsdale. Scottsdale Public Art credits it to Carolyn Braaksma, a Denver artist born in 1951, and dates it 2000. Braaksma’s own portfolio dates it 1999 and names her partners: architect Andrea Forman and landscape architect Jeffrey Engelmann.
The theme is the desert. Scottsdale Public Art counts about 90 distinct images, among them prickly pear cactus up to 40 feet tall and lizards 67 feet long, on walls that reach nearly 50 feet where the road drops below grade. Braaksma lists the rest of the vocabulary: lizard shapes, lizard-skin texture, desert plants, topographical references, Maricopa Indian patterns and rustication that imitates the ribs of a saguaro. She chose colors you almost never see on a highway, desert tones of pink, lavender and sage green.
It is not a mural painted on afterward. The images are part of the walls themselves, stained concrete and steel railing. And they run on both faces: the freeway side, and the neighborhood side that the houses look at.
It may be the largest piece of public art in Arizona. It is probably the most seen. Scottsdale paid for it.
How to see it without getting anyone hurt
Rule one: the driver drives. This is a freeway artwork, and the only safe way to look at the freeway side is from a moving car with someone else at the wheel. Put the photographer in the passenger seat. Don’t slow down below the flow of traffic to get a better look, and never pull onto the shoulder. The shoulder is for breakdowns and emergency vehicles, not viewing.
Drive it both ways. The walls are treated on both sides of the roadway, and from any one lane you mostly see the wall across from you. One pass northbound and one southbound shows you twice as much.
Pick the hour. The work is relief: textures and shapes cast into concrete. At noon the desert sun flattens them out completely. In the first hours after sunrise and the last hour before sunset, low light rakes across the walls, and the lizard skin and saguaro ribbing stand up off the surface. Weekend mornings also mean traffic that moves at a steady speed, which is what a passenger with a camera needs.
Go to the neighborhood side on foot. Scottsdale Public Art is explicit that the art covers the neighborhood faces of the walls too. That side is the one you can stand in front of legally, from a public sidewalk or street in the subdivisions that back onto the freeway: along the city’s eastern edge near Pima Park on Thomas Road, and in the north near Aztec Park off 100th Street. Stay on public ground. The walls back onto private yards and HOA common areas, and a wall being visible from a street does not make the land in front of it public.
Walk across an overpass. Braaksma says the designs are built into the safety railings as well as the walls. A surface-street bridge over the freeway with a sidewalk is a legal place to see the railing work up close and look down the cut at the walls below. We haven’t yet logged which overpasses carry the treated railings.
What we can’t tell you yet. Nobody, including us, has published where each of the roughly 90 images sits. We don’t yet know which stretch has the 67-foot lizards, where Braaksma’s 500-foot pedestrian wall is, or whether the stretch on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community’s side of the boundary carries the same treatment. That mile-by-mile map is the next thing this page needs. If you’ve shot the walls and logged where, we want to hear from you.
Connect it to the rest of the freeway story. Our page on April 7, 2002, the day the last link of Loop 101 opened between Scottsdale Road and Pima Road, covers how the freeway got built and what it did to the city. For the art you can walk up to, start with our public art walking tour and the drivable public art on the road field guide.
How a city put lizards on a state highway
Freeways in Arizona are state projects, built by ADOT. The art on this one was Scottsdale’s idea and Scottsdale’s money. In ADOT’s account, the city proposed and funded the artwork, and it quotes a federal transportation blog: “Renowned for its thriving arts community, the City of Scottsdale was anxious to preserve its artistic reputation and minimize the impact of the $131 million project on citizens and visitors.” That number is the freeway project’s. The art budget itself is not in any source we found.
The process was an ordinary public-art one, scaled up. Braaksma was chosen through a public art competition as the project’s design-team artist, a role that put her on the team designing the walls rather than handing her finished ones to decorate. In 1996 she and the design team started holding community workshops to find a theme the neighborhoods would accept. ADOT says the team also “consulted with museum curators, botanical garden staff and the community.” What came out was a desert vocabulary: cacti and other plants, lizards, and what Scottsdale Public Art calls “an abstracted Native American inspired motif” and Braaksma calls “Maricopa Indian patterns.”
What’s actually on the walls
Braaksma’s description is the most specific one on record. Her team designed images and textures on highway bridge piers, on eight miles of concrete noise abatement walls, and on the on- and off-ramps. The work is built into safety railings, into wall treatments on the neighborhood sides of the sound walls, and into highway walls as tall as 40 feet. The imagery includes:
- lizard shapes, and a separate lizard-skin texture
- desert plants, including the giant prickly pears
- topographical references
- Maricopa Indian patterns
- rustication that emulates the ribs of a saguaro
Her portfolio lists two pieces by size: a pedestrian wall 12 feet by 500 feet and an Agave Wall panel 8 feet by 8 feet by 1½ inches. The media are stained concrete walls and steel railings.
The colors were deliberate. The team “closely studied similar projects in the Phoenix/Scottsdale area to confirm that their work was unique but still within the same family,” Braaksma writes, and chose “desert tones of pink, lavender, and sage green” because they are rarely seen in highway work.
The numbers don’t agree
Two primary sources describe this project, and they differ in three places.
- Length. Scottsdale Public Art: “six miles of the Pima Freeway/Loop 101.” Braaksma: “eight miles of concrete noise abatement walls.” Wikipedia puts Scottsdale’s stretch of Loop 101 at about 7.8 miles.
- Height. Scottsdale Public Art: walls “up to 50 feet” and “nearly 50 feet high, as the road goes below grade.” Braaksma: “highway walls as tall as 40 feet.” One may be counting the full retained height and the other the treated face; we don’t know.
- Date. Scottsdale Public Art: completed 2000. Braaksma: 1999. The freeway segments through Scottsdale opened in stages, and the final link between Scottsdale Road and Pima Road did not open until April 2002, so “completed” may mean different things to the artist and the city.
Where the rest of the story lives
The record that would settle all three is in three places. The Scottsdale City Council minutes from about 1996 to 2000 should hold the vote that funded the art and the amount; the City Clerk’s minutes archive and the Scottsdale Room at the Civic Center Library are the places to look. Scottsdale Public Art’s collection file should hold the artist contract, the workshop records and, with luck, the motif list. And ADOT should hold the Pima Freeway’s design concept report and aesthetic-treatment plan sheets, which would show exactly which wall got which image.
Why it matters
Scottsdale likes to say it is an arts town, and it usually means the galleries on Main Street. This is the better evidence. A city looked at miles of blank concrete that a state agency was about to pour through its neighborhoods and decided, at its own expense, that the concrete should look like the desert it was replacing. The result is seen by more people than anything in the galleries of Old Town, and it has less written about it than a single bronze horse. The lizards have been out there for a quarter century. They deserve a field guide.