Higher Ground: My Parents, One RV, and What Arizona’s White Mountains Taught Us About Water
A family road trip from Phoenix to Greer, Hon-Dah and Show Low, and a reminder that the places we love only last if we take care of them.
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a family when the city falls away behind you. At the end of September, I loaded up the RV with the people who matter most to me: my mom, my dad, my sister, and Chief, our Doberman, who has decided that a red sweater and a dog bed under the awning is his natural habitat. We left Phoenix on a Tuesday and came home on a Sunday.
In between, we climbed more than 7,000 feet, ate pancakes the size of hubcaps, watched elk and deer move through the meadows, and saw with our own eyes how thin Arizona’s water margin has become. This is a story about family and memory. It is also a story about stewardship.
The Road Up the Mountain
The drive up was a test. Rain came down so hard that at times we could barely see the road ahead. Anyone who has driven Arizona’s high country in a storm knows the feeling: the wipers losing the fight, the pines crowding the shoulders, everyone in the coach a little quieter than usual. It was our first trip to Greer in this RV, and the mountain made sure we earned the arrival.
And then you arrive. Phoenix sits at roughly 1,100 feet. Greer sits at about 8,400 feet, which makes it the highest town in Arizona. In a single day’s drive you cross from saguaro country into ponderosa pine, aspen and wet green meadows. Few places on earth offer that range in one afternoon, and it is one of the great gifts of living in this state.
Greer, Where Time Keeps Its Own Pace
For my family, Greer was never just a dot on a map. Growing up in Nogales, it was the trip we looked forward to all year. Labor Day weekends and summer breaks meant carloads of family and friends heading north to escape the border heat. Greer was where we fished, where we hiked, and where my dad taught me to read the land.
Going back felt like walking into those summers again. Greer still has that hometown feeling: a small community, a few lodges and cabins, and a river running through all of it. One morning we walked over to the Rendezvous Diner, housed in a log cabin that dates back to 1909. We have been eating breakfast there since my sister and I were little kids. Before we even sat down, my dad was talking about the pancakes. He remembered them as enormous, and he was right. Some things do not shrink when you grow up.
On the walk over, my dad stopped mid-step and pointed. My father has been a hunter his whole life, and I have been hunting with him since I was a boy. His eyes have always been sharper than mine when it comes to spotting game, and nothing has changed. There, lounging in a field by the river near the restaurant, was a huge bull elk. Late September is elk rut season in Arizona’s high country, when bulls bugle across the valleys. Watching my dad find that elk before any of us did, I felt like a kid again.
Over two nights in Greer we saw deer at dawn, elk in the meadows and even a beaver working along the water. The creeks were running full and loud after the rains. Everything was green, wet and alive.
That abundance is not just scenery. Near Greer, the forks of the Little Colorado River come together and begin a journey of almost 340 miles across northeastern Arizona to meet the Colorado River at the Grand Canyon. Only the headwaters and the lowest stretch of that river flow year round. In other words, the running water we enjoyed in Greer is one of the rare, reliable sources feeding a much larger system.
These mountains also carry scars. In 2011 the Wallow Fire burned more than half a million acres in the White Mountains, the largest wildfire in modern Arizona history. Fifteen years later, crews are still restoring meadows nearby, building small log structures that slow the water down, raise the water table and help the land soak up moisture again. Recovery takes time, but it is possible.
Hon-Dah: Be My Guest
From Greer we headed down the mountain toward Show Low and spent one evening at the Hon-Dah RV Park, part of the Hon-Dah Resort Casino, owned and operated by the White Mountain Apache Tribe. Hon-Dah means “be my guest” in Apache, and that is exactly how it felt. The White Mountain Apache have lived on and cared for this land for generations, and their homeland on the Fort Apache Reservation spans 1.6 million acres.
My parents enjoy the slot machines, and that night the mountain was generous. My mom, my dad and my sister all walked away winners. I will leave it to you to decide whether it was skill, luck, or simply the good fortune of being welcomed as guests on Apache land. We called it a blessing and left it at that.
Fool Hollow Lake and the Water Line
Our last two nights were at Fool Hollow Lake Recreation Area in Show Low. By Friday the storm had broken. The sky turned that deep high-country blue, the air was cool and dry, and we had a beautiful RV site under the pines. Chief claimed his spot under the awning and supervised the campground.
We had camped at Fool Hollow a couple of years ago in my previous RV, so I knew what this lake is supposed to look like. This time it was impossible to miss how far the water had dropped. The shoreline had pulled back, leaving wide bands of exposed earth and grass where water used to be. Families who came out to fish were squeezed into a small stretch of water, casting wherever they could reach it. It was sad to see.
It was not just my impression. In September 2026, Arizona State Parks closed Fool Hollow Lake to swimming, kayaking, boating and paddleboarding because the water was too low, leaving only hiking and fishing. Both boat ramps are closed because of historically low levels. This is a lake that was created in 1957 by damming Show Low Creek: about 150 acres, averaging 23 feet deep, sitting at roughly 6,300 feet in the cool pines. If a lake like this is struggling, it tells us something.
What the Science Says
Why would a lake in the cool, temperate White Mountains run this low? The answer starts with snow.
Arizona’s high-country lakes and rivers depend on winter snowpack, which melts slowly in spring and feeds streams and reservoirs into the summer. Snow on the Colorado Plateau supplies four of Arizona’s most important rivers, including the Salt, the Verde and the Little Colorado. When the snow does not come, or melts too early, the whole system feels it.
This past winter, the snow barely came. Winter 2025 to 2026 was Arizona’s warmest winter on record. A record-breaking heat wave in March melted the state’s mountain snowpack about 35 days earlier than average. Federal drought scientists now describe Water Year 2026 as a year of record-low snowpack, early melt and exceptionally poor spring runoff across the Intermountain West, with Arizona tying its warmest summer on record.
Put simply, the rain we drove through on the way up was welcome, but a few storms cannot replace a missing winter. Fool Hollow is a small lake telling a big story, and it is the same story playing out on the Colorado River and in reservoirs across the West. Water is an issue in every corner of Arizona, not just the desert.
Stewards, Not Spectators
I serve on the Board of Trustees of The Nature Conservancy in Arizona, and the most important lesson that work has taught me is a hopeful one: nature can survive and thrive when we take care of it. Since 1966, the Conservancy has protected more than 1.5 million acres of Arizona lands important to people and wildlife. Forest restoration in northern Arizona has generated $216 million in economic impact and supported more than 1,000 jobs, and the Conservancy secured the state’s first instream flow water rights, so that water can stay in creeks for fish and wildlife.
Healthy forests and wet meadows work like a sponge, holding snow and rain and releasing it slowly to the streams below. Conservation is not about locking nature away. It is about keeping the sponge working so that families like mine can keep coming back.
So what can each of us do?
Treat water as the finite resource it is, at home in Phoenix just as much as at the lake.
Leave campsites, trails and shorelines better than we found them.
Support the people and organizations restoring forests, rivers and meadows, including tribal nations who have cared for these lands far longer than any of us.
Take our kids and our parents outdoors. People protect what they love, and they love what they know.
Leaving It Better
On Sunday we drove the RV back down to Phoenix. Somewhere along the way I thought about how lucky I am. Lucky to still make these trips with my mom and dad. Lucky that my dad can still spot a bull elk before anyone else. Lucky that the Rendezvous Diner still serves pancakes as big as he remembers.
The Greer of my childhood is still there. But it is not guaranteed. Our obligation, as Arizonans and as families, is to share these outdoors generously and to care for them seriously, so that we leave them in better condition than we found them. That way, another family from Nogales, or Phoenix, or anywhere, can stand in a meadow at 8,000 feet and have their grandfather point out a bull elk by the river.
Nos vemos en la montaña.
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