The morning lake ritual in the White Mountains

Outdoors · White Mountains

What is the morning lake ritual in Arizona's White Mountains?

The Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests hold a scatter of high-country lakes and reservoirs across Arizona's White Mountains, from the country around Pinetop-Lakeside and Lakeside out toward Greer and the Little Colorado headwaters. The local ritual is simple and it is not an attraction: get to one of them before the sun clears the trees, stay an hour or two, and be home by mid-morning. On a stay of a month or more, that becomes the best habit this range has to offer.

What makes it a ritual rather than an outing is the hour. At first light these lakes are glass, the mist is still coming off the water, elk are often out in the meadow edges, and there is frequently nobody else there. By ten in the morning it is a different place. This is the single biggest advantage a long stay has over a short trip here — a person up for three days sleeps in and goes at eleven, and a person here for two months goes at five-thirty on a Wednesday and gets the version worth having.

You do not have to fish for it to work, though plenty of people do. Coffee from a thermos on a folding chair counts. So does a walk along the shoreline, a book, or a pair of binoculars. The whole point is that it costs nothing to repeat and it never gets old, because the light and the water are different every time.

A few practical things that genuinely matter, and this is where people get caught out. Fishing anywhere in Arizona requires a current state license. Separately — and importantly — some waters in this region sit on tribal land and require their own permit rather than a state license, so confirm which jurisdiction the specific lake you are headed to falls under before you go. Many lake approaches are on unpaved forest roads that get rutted and greasy after rain, and a low car will limit where you can reasonably go.

Seasonally, June through October is the window. July and August are the monsoon: bright clear mornings that build into serious afternoon thunderstorms, which is another argument for going early and being off the open water long before the sky changes. September and October are the clearest and quietest weeks of the year. In winter the higher lakes freeze, some access roads go unplowed, and the ritual either becomes an ice-fishing pursuit for the properly equipped or stops until spring. And spring itself is muddy, gray and slow to arrive at 7,000 feet — the honest low point of the year up here.

One more honest note: cell coverage out at the lakes is unreliable to nonexistent. Tell someone where you are going, and do not count on a signal from the shoreline.

If you're here for a month or more

A month lets you rotate. Pick three or four different waters across the Apache-Sitgreaves and go to a different one each week rather than returning to the same convenient one — you will find your own before the stay is over, and it will not be the one in the guidebooks. Keep the chair, thermos, layers and license in the car permanently so the decision to go takes no effort at five in the morning, and use the full kitchen in your MidStays home to actually cook what you catch instead of photographing it and letting it go.