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I came across a column I wrote for the Tucson Citizen nearly 14 years ago that some of you may enjoy. If this piece were to be used again I'd have to add Home Depot and Lowes to the list of chain stores and increase prices for land and the number of elk that can be seen. Bill Quimby GREER (July 17,1998) – The White Mountains have changed a lot over the 50 consecutive summers I’ve been coming up here. It may be hard for newcomers to imagine that it used to be a long, bumpy ride between the towns of Show Low, Lakeside and Pinetop, or that everything (except one gas station) shut down promptly at 5 p.m. on weekdays and was closed on Sundays and after noon on Saturdays. If you were hungry, you had only two choices – Charley Clark’s in Pinetop or Molly Butler’s in Greer. There was little else in between. There were only six lakes on the whole mountain, and they were called Big, Crescent, Greer, Tunnel, Bunch and Becker. Sunrise Lake – to say nothing about the Sunrise Ski Area – wasn’t even a dream in some planner’s mind when I first fished the Little Colorado River as a boy. For skiers, there was a small run on a hill where a microwave tower now stands, not far from what now is A-1 Lake, and a short run on the hill behind what now is the Amberian Point Resort in Greer. There were no designated campgrounds or recreational areas. We could pitch a tent or park a camper anywhere in the forest we wanted – even on the reservation – and our favorite sites were alongside streams. When the U.S. Forest Service started forcing everyone to use the new campgrounds it was building far from water, lots of campers rebelled and passed petitions, which were ignored. It didn’t matter where on the mountain we fished or hunted. Fish and wildlife on the White Mountain Apache Reservation still were under the jurisdiction of the Arizona Game and Fish Department, and we needed only state licenses. Mule deer could be seen standing along the roadways just about everywhere at any time of day, but it was a red-letter day when an elk was sighted. Residents and cabin owners had few problems with bears. When a bear wandered into a campground or a back yard, people talked about the incident for months. McNary was a booming sawmill town with a railroad that brought logs down from the high country. It had its own hotel and a general store that sold everything from ax handles to china dishes to ladies fashions to groceries to lantern wicks and nails. Stopping at that store was a highlight of every visitor’s trip. Maverick was a real town, too, with its own post office, and it would be a long time before it became just a name on a map. The fork in the road between McNary and Pinetop wasn’t called Hondah yet. Nobody would have believed that a huge, domed stadium would be built someday at Eager, or that they would ever move the statue commemorating the pioneer woman and child away from the post office to two different sites in Springerville. People still talked about a trout hatchery that used to be at the end of the road at Greer, and the quarter-acre pond on Badger Creek that was stocked with trout for children and blind anglers, but both were gone long before my first trip here. So were all the small 200- to 500-acre ”wildlife refuges” that once occupied prime habitat all over the mountain. The road to the White Mountains from Tucson has undergone the greatest change in the past half century, though. It could take up to 10 hours to drive here by way of Tiger (a town that was swallowed up by what became the San Manuel Mine) or more if we were delayed by road construction. The road through the Gila River gorge was much higher up the canyon past Winkleman than it is now and much narrower and rougher. (The present road was built on an old railroad bed.) When there was a summer storm, a short tunnel sometimes filled with rocks and gravel, forcing us to turn around and take the alternate route through Ray (another victim of an open-pit mine). Kearny and San Manuel didn’t exist. The road through Salt River Canyon was always being worked on, and delays of two hours were common when highway crews were blasting and bulldozing. Today, it takes only a bit less than five hours to drive from my home in Tucson to my cabin in Greer. The towns of Show Low, Lakeside and Pinetop have grown together, and there are Wal-Marts, Kmarts, Circle Ks, golf courses and just about every fast-food outlet that was ever franchised. Property that once could be bought for $300 to $750 an acre now costs $75,000 to $100,000 or even more. The casino at Hondah is undergoing non-stop expansion, but nobody slows up going through McNary. There are more than 30 trout lakes now, and lots of campgrounds and snowmobile and cross-country ski trails. It is not unusual to see 75 or more elk during a sunrise drive over back roads. Sunrise Ski Area is one of the West’s largest. Although the White Mountains remain Arizona’s premiere summer vacation area, I yearn for the time when there were far fewer people.