Pinetop Live Cam

The various departments consist of: Golf Course Maintenance, Food & Beverage Department, Building Maintenance, Administrative and Pro Shop. The following positions are available each year: Grounds men (course workers), Equipment operators, Grounds Foreman, Bartenders, Bar Cart Operator, Waitresses, Bussers, Pearl Divers, Prep Cooks, Line Cooks, Pantry workers, Janitorial, Youth Recreation Center Workers, Building Maintenance, Office & Clerical and Snack Bar Workers.

Activities abound. If you are a golfer, the choice of courses is awesome. Picnic at beautiful Woodland Lake Park in the heart of Pinetop-Lakeside or camp and picnic in the thousands of acres of National Forest that surround the area! When in season, fishing, hunting, skiing, and golfing, are almost everyday activities for locals. "Antiqueing" is a popular activity in Pinetop-Lakeside at the many antique shops. Art galleries offer works of talented local artists. Historical sites, including Fort Apache, ruins, petroglyphs, museums and monuments can be found all over this area. Trace the path of the Spanish explorers or tour the Mormon pioneers' restored homes. The volcanic fields and other geologic formations are fascinating. Festivals, hiking trails, horseback riding, art shows, parades, rodeos, car shows, concerts, live theater performances, clubs, swimming, movies, shopping, nite clubs; the list is endless.

The area surrounding Pinetop-Lakeside is a virtual panorama of beauty and serenity with views that will take your breath away. Take a drive to the Painted Desert or the Petrified Forest, just a few miles from our location. Visit Hannigans Meadow or the picturesque settings of Greer or Alpine. There are Jeep trails for the more adventurous or take the tram up the mountain at Sunrise, our popular local golf resort.

Before the fire, a vacation in Arizona's White Mountains meant mornings filled with fishing, hiking or golf and afternoons on the porch or at the campsite, waiting out a summer shower beneath the big pines. Dinner meant anything from fine dining to campfire fare. With nightfall came the opportunity to wear a sweater, play a game with the family, take in a movie, maybe drop a few bucks in the slot machines at the casino. Bedtime meant sleeping under the blankets or outside under a blanket of stars. After the fire - it's pretty much the same, at least in the areas that attract the most refugees from summer heat in Phoenix and Tucson and especially after the lifting of many of the forest closures in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest last weekend.

The forests surrounding the 40-mile tourist crescent that stretches along Arizona 60 through Show Low and southeast on Arizona 260 to Lakeside, Pinetop, Hon Dah, Sunrise and Greer were untouched by the Rodeo-Chediski fire that destroyed 468,638 acres of forest south and west of here. The same is true on the most-visited lands of the White Mountain Apache. Many of its 420 miles of trout streams and 7,000 campsites lie east of Arizona 60, a line the fire did not cross. The message being sent this month to the heat-addled residents of Arizona's urban areas by tourism promoters is that before-and-after pictures of life in the White Mountains are identical.

The more intrepid vacationers knew that already and received a rare treat in the first week following the fire - a chance to play in the pines with more elbow room than the area's hordes of summer visitors usually allow. Lisa and Brad Shull, who live north of Phoenix in the community of Anthem, had planned a two-week vacation at Fool Hollow Lake State Park, just west of Show Low, beginning the last week in June. They had to park their travel trailer at Mormon Lake for the first week as the fire forced evacuation of their original destination. Mormon Lake, southeast of Flagstaff, is dry for the fourth year in a row. "We didn't know that," Lisa Shull said. The Shulls couldn't wait to get over to Fool Hollow Lake with the boys: Zach, 5, Zane, who celebrated his 4th birthday Friday, and Zeke, who is nearly 2 years old. They came as soon as the evacuation order was lifted.

Fool Hollow Lake still had plenty of water in it, though the drought had drained it some before the helicopters fighting the nearby fire began dipping their buckets into it, lowering it to 14 feet below normal. Lisa Shull said it was the first vacation she and her husband had actually planned in about 10 years and they were determined to take it, come hell or low water. Lisa and the boys managed to do just that. Brad, a major-claims adjustor with the Hartford Insurance Company, went back to work after parking the family's fifth-wheel trailer and unloading the bikes and the ATV. His golf clubs haven't moved from their place under the canopy.

Shull said he didn't want the company to bring in an outside adjustor to cover for him. "This is my state," he said. So while Brad commuted to the nearby burned subdivisions along the Mogollon Rim, Lisa and the boys took walks and rides, built a tepee and enjoyed the respite from the valley heat. When Brad returned in the evening, the family went into Show Low where Lisa went antiquing and Brad took the boys to ride go-carts. The Shulls said they didn't have to adapt any plans to post-fire realities. "Really, the only restrictions are on fires and you can still cook on a gas grill," Brad Shull said.

About 25 miles farther west along Arizona 260, things are not the same. In Overgaard, at Elk's Landing Kabins, owner Kathy Ouellette lost all her July reservations, half her pine trees, her laundry room and one of her three rental cabins to the fire. The Ouellettes started building their complex eight years ago when they bought property along the highway in the less visited part of the forest, sensing a need for vacation rentals outside the busy areas of Show Low and Pinetop/Lakeside.

She and husband, Dennis, plan to rebuild the burned cabin as soon as they get a check from the insurance company. In the meantime, she's open for business. She says she feels blessed that her home and two cabins, one that accommodates up to four people and another that sleeps eight, are still standing, as is a good portion of the forest around her. The same is not true across the street, on the south side of 260, where an untouched sign advertises "The Inn at the Ponderosa - fine dining, spirits, bed and breakfast." The Inn behind the sign is ash. This is the area where you would go to get a real sense of the devastation that occurred. It still smells of smoke. On Friday, yellow-shirted fire crews were at work trying to prevent floods. Bright yellow planes swooped low over the tree tops, spreading seed. The area's two hotels were filled with insurance adjustors and Red Cross representatives.

This was the northern edge of fire. Firefighters tried to hold the line at Arizona 260, but flames leaped the roadway where the burn was hottest. In many areas, the trees are tall charcoal sticks. The ground is coated with ash, which blows across the highway in a stiff breeze, looking ominously like smoke.

You'll see no ash if you simply drive into Show Low and turn right, taking Arizona 260 east. You might, however, see smoke. On Friday afternoon, after the Forest Service took down the barricades leading to Greer Lakes, a couple of families who had rushed over to try catching a trout or two, paused to watch a helicopter land in a nearby field for refueling. The helicopter had been dumping water all day on a lightning-caused fire in the hills northwest of Greer. Smoke from the fire was visible in the alpine valley where Molly Butler first entertained guests at her lodge in 1910.

The lodge and its restaurant are today the focal point of Greer, a collection of cabins, shops and restaurants in an alpine valley 40 miles east of Show Low and a quick 15-mile jog from the White Mountain Apache resort at Sunrise Mountain. A river, the Little Colorado, runs through it, and so does a healthy respect for the gorgeous natural setting. The forest was the lunch conversation for the Morriss/Hubbell clan on the porch of the Rendezvous restaurant in Greer. They spoke of the dryness of the trees, the need for rain and the danger of the lightning strikes that preceded it.

Chuck Morriss, a Realtor in Mesa, said the forests need better management. He worked years for Southwest Forest Products, and said resumption of logging would go a long way toward easing fire danger in the forests of Arizona. You can log without clear-cutting, he said, and you can offer incentives for the logging companies to take smaller trees that supply a ladder for fire to the tops of the big ones.

His daughter, Dana Hubbell, a 45-year-old real estate agent in Tempe, said she had driven up to Greer to spend a week at a friend's cabin on July 1, the day Arizona 60 reopened to traffic. She passed smoke still rising from the left side of the highway and found Greer intact, but deserted. Things picked up on the July 4 weekend, but merchants reported a much smaller crowd than normal. Last week, her parents, Chuck and Jal, joined her, along with her son, J.T., 15. "One of the things that propelled us to come was curiosity about the fire," Chuck Morriss said.

The other was his wife Jal's continuing need to seek out Western adventures to share with her grandchildren. The foursome spent Friday riding horses through the forest on the X-Diamond Ranch, just northwest of Greer in South Fork, where the Little Colorado drops another 1,000 feet to meander through the pastures of Wink Crigler's family ranch. Crigler, 60, is the granddaughter of Molly Butler, the woman who put Greer on the map at the turn of the last century. Her 2,000 acres of private land has been open to her visitors all along for hiking, horseback riding and fishing. She, too, lost her July reservations for the seven house-sized cabins on the ranch, even though she was a good 50 miles from the fire.

She ended up filling her cabins with evacuees from the threatened areas, and she filled her pasture with 20 visiting horses. Crigler's working ranch is most famous for its annual Cowboy Golf competition, which she cancelled this year. The year before it had attracted about 1,000 people and she thought that a bit much in this year of continuing drought and fire fear. Not that she fears fire in her greenbelt where a century old water right to the Little Colorado allows her to keep the pastures green. She also thins her forest and burns the slash when the snow comes.

She offers up her ranch as a model for other White Mountain communities and says there is a way to have forest policy that accommodates tourism, logging, ranching and the wildlife that lives there. Thin the forests and let them burn in years when the big trees are wet enough to survive a cool fire, she says. Thinning is expensive, she concedes, but "that fire cost $43 million to fight. That would go a long ways."

For a bird's-eye view of the forest, you can't beat a ski lift ride to the top of the peak at Sunrise Ski Resort, owned by the White Mountain Apache tribe. The lifts run on weekends from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. You can eat a meal at the restaurant on top and take in the panorama of mountain and forest. Here, you get some understanding of how fire could consume so much and still leave so much intact. The Apache and Sitgreaves national forests encompass 2 million acres of mountain and trees. The Fort Apache Indian Reservation, where 70 percent of the burn occurred is 1.6 million acres.

Look at the panorama from the mountaintop. To the east, the Apache Forest runs into the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. To the west, beyond your view, the Sitgreaves borders the Tonto and Coconino national forests. You can see for miles and you see little in the way of human development. Look at a map. The populated areas here are tiny white spots in a sea of green forest. But those tiny spots accommodate a lot of visitors in the hotel rooms of Show Low, the cabins of Lakeside, the summer condos and vacation homes of Pinetop the resort at Sunrise and the campgrounds of the forest and the Apache reservation.

The area boasts more than 65 lakes and streams, hundreds of miles of hiking trails, thousands of campsites and, most importantly, temperatures 10 to 20 degrees cooler than the sweltering deserts. The fire restrictions are still in place. In Greer, there is no smoking anywhere outside, by order of the fire chief. The same is true throughout the national forests and Indian lands. Campfires and charcoal fires are also forbidden. There is plenty of forest left in the White Mountains and the folks who watch over it would like to keep it that way.