America's Continental Divide location is widely viewed as set in stone, so to speak. Once upon a time, The Continental Divide morphed 100 miles east of its true course and took up residence in the Mule Mountains a few miles west of bustling Bisbee, Arizona.
For the better part of a generation everyone, including the federal government, believed The Continental Divide could be visited atop the challenging topography of Mule Pass.
Today's savvy travelers guffaw at the antiquated notion Mule Pass split drainages of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Some folks even think it's an age old prank perhaps perpetuated by prisoners who helped transform a crude wagon road into a passable automobile route that eventually became highway US 80.
Harking back to the teens of the fledgling 20th Century, the nuances of geography and hydrology were scarcely known. People thought of the sprawling Lower Sonoran Desert landscape in broad Big Picture perspectives. The finer points of precisely where water flowed out in the far flung playas and dead end dry washes simply wasn't something people knew or cared about.
Meanwhile, the 6,030 foot elevation of Mule Pass was etched tall in everyone's mind. To muleskinners hauling heavy loads to the Bisbee mining camps Mule Pass was a fearsome obstacle. Even ordinary travelers harbored healthy respect for the steep-sided slopes of Mule Pass. It was a place to be reckoned with. Besides that, the route up and over Mule Pass was the highest point for hundreds of square miles around.
When the often outrageous monsoon storms pummeled the Mule Mountains, water rushed in torrents two ways off Mule Pass often swamping Bisbee with destructive and sometimes fatal results. Although the exact origins of Mule Pass as The Continental Divide are lost in the dust bin of history, it's reasonable speculation to presume local folks simply started calling the pass The Divide. After all, it says so right on the topo map.
And so if it's The Divide, then why not The Continental Divide? As far as local folks were concerned anything East of Bisbee was just a flat, gawd-forsaken desert that stretched to The Rio Grande at El Paso.
Sure enough when the feds created US 80 in the mid-1920's, the Bureau of Public Roads put out a 1927 news release describing the highway that said, "The road reaches the summit of the Continental Divide about three miles west of Bisbee, Arizona, at the Mule Pass - altitude 6,035 feet." Mule Pass was the highest point on US 80 from Savannah, Georgia, to San Diego, California. What better site could there be to place The Continental Divide?
It was an accepted fact, even if it was off by over 100 miles.
Former ADOT Public Information Officer Peter Corbett captured a quote that perfectly sums up how local folks felt about The Continental Divide's misplaced credentials: "Deloris Reynolds, Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum voluntary librarian, said she could find no evidence anyone ever tried to correct the mistake. “I suspect many (locals) did not know it was wrong and others probably didn’t care,” she said."
Modern visitors to Mule Pass justifiably roll their eyes and smirk at the stately stone monument marking The Continental Divide. Considering the lack of knowledge and the "tenor of the times," such a misplaced belief is easy to understand and accept.
The actual location of The Continental Divide on old US 80 and today's I-10 is so obscure, so flat, so non-descript and so uninspiring as to be completely boring and unworthy of any attention from passersby. As the majestic, soaring mountain crests that form The Continental Divide's iconic image in American mythology fade into the Lower Sonoran's vast expanse of desert scrub brush, so to does the actual dividing of the waters disappear in a jigsaw puzzle of playas and arroyos to nowhere.
As the author of the New Mexico Guide to the Continental Divide Trail says, ""The CDT's end, or beginning, will be, well, unassuming, at best. Underwhelming, perhaps anticlimactic. A wire fence, a dirt road, and miles of scrub and brush. But that's okay. After all, on journeys such as these, the inner landscape is what's important."
It's little wonder that local folks and highway boosters bought into Mule Pass as The Continental Divide. Why Not? Who knew the difference? And who cared?
We did quite a bit of study to compile numerous resources regarding Mule Pass and also the actual Continental Divide. Commentary follows each photo or graphic below.
The first mention we can find of the Mule Pass monument is in a Page 9 article published September 6, 1914, by "The Bisbee Daily Review." Source:
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/50938926/pulsating-machine-mule-pass/
It was common practice in early highway days to use convicts on road construction jobs. An unknown number of convicts converted a wagon route into what was then
called "The Hanging Road" because of the difficulty of construction. Photo Source:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mule-pass-not-quite-the-continental-divide
US 80 (and now I-10) actually crossed The Continental Divide at Separ, New Mexico, 100+ airline miles and ~143 highway miles from Mule Pass. App used to calculate distances:
https://www.mapdevelopers.com/distance_from_to.php
The far southern terminus of the CDT is located 100 airline miles practically due east of Mule Pass. Finding this location appears to be a daunting challenge:
"Directions: To access the CDT’s southern terminus remote location take Interstate 10 east from Lordsburg, NM to Exit 49. Take NM 146 South to Hachita. In Hatchita, go east on NM 9 and then south on NM 81. Continue south for approximately 11 miles and just before the curve in the highway, turn left onto the graded dirt road (all roads beyond this point are dirt). Set your odometer, travel
approximately 3 miles, and turn right. Go another 3 miles and turn left. Follow this road around the base of the Big Hatchet Mountains for about 20 miles to a windmill and go east for 2 miles. Within 100 yards, you will be at the international boundary barbed wire fence. At the cattle guard, there is a
concrete monument commemorating the Crazy cook who murdered someone at this site. The Continental Divide National Scenic Trail is 200 yards north along the border fence from this monument." Source:
https://continentaldividetrail.org/project/southern-terminus-of-continental-
divide-trail-and-the-big-hatchet-mountains/
Here is a view of the parking lot at the southern end of the CDT. For more location information see:
https://www.latlong.net/place/crazy-cook-monument-hachita-nm-usa-27705.html
Although the Hatchet Mountains are a prominent landmark on the horizon, the landscape upon which the Continental Divide sits is about as flat as flat can get. Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hatchet_Mountains
The twisty-turny trip up and over Mule Pass was a thorn in the side of Bisbeeans practically since the first wagon load of supplies dropped down the steep slopes into the ragged gulches of a frontier mining camp. After decades of clamor, lobbying and numerous fatalities, the Arizona State Highway Dept. began a two-year tunnel project that was the largest Arizona highway construction project of its kind ever undertaken up to that time.
A 1,400 foot tunnel cut six miles off a trip over The Mule Mountains. The new tunnel was dedicated with much fanfare on December 19, 1958. For coverage & details of the dedication see these links:
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/51103942/tucson-version-of-tunnel-dedication/
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/51102228/tunnel-dedication/
https://azdot.gov/adot-blog/mule-pass-tunnel-has-eased-trip-bisbee-60-years
To take a look at a drive through the tunnel see this find dash cam video by the Cochise County Sheriff's Office:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=543285556153613
This Google Earth screen clip shows how the tunnel was created almost directly underneath "The Continental Divide" of Mule Pass. The left arrow shows old US 80 joining the modern day highway west of the tunnel. Middle arrow is the location of The Mule Pass monument. Right arrow shows how old US 80 came into Upper West Bisbee.
Interestingly, Mule Pass wasn't the only location to be mislabeled "Continental Divide."
"Near Victorio siding (named from the Apache chief referred to on p. 147), which is in the middle of the valley, the rounded slopes of the Cedar Grove Mountains extend along the north side of the valley, and the more rugged outlines of the Sierra Rica rise prominently to the southwest.22 About 1-1/2 miles west of Continental siding there is a sign reading "Continental Divide," but this is a mistake, as the basin of Hachita Creek, to the west, empties into the Rio Casas Grandes in Mexico, which, like other streams east to Arena, drains into Lake Guzman."
This same publication describes the old railroad crossing of the actual Divide:
"The Continental Divide is crossed on the inconspicuous summit a few miles west of Playas siding, at an elevation of about 4,515 feet. To the west of this point the drainage flows into the Animas River, which empties into the playas west of Lordsburg. These playas, on the rare occasions when they overflow, drain into the Gila River, which empties into the Colorado River and thus into the Gulf of
California."
Source:
https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/geology/publications/bul/845/images/sheet20.jpg
In closing, we believe the Mule Pass Continental Divide monument to be a sparkling gem of early Arizona's road building legacy. Engineers and managers at the time worked with what they had and used what they thought was the best available information. They cannot be faulted for a egregious 100+ mile geography error. They no doubt believed they "had it right." Meanwhile, Mule Pass was and remains a wonderful location to actually ponder The Continental Divide. It's hard to imagine anyone getting excited about standing in a flat barren desert while contemplating water flowing to the oceans.
Mule Pass is definitely one of the more evocative, unique and noteworthy remaining attractions of old US 80's wildly winding route through Arizona. It deserves attention and a visit from any highway heritage tourist.
Additional source information:
The photo at the top of this post is almost certainly a Burton Frasher picture. It is framed in classic Frasher style and the handwriting on the photo easily matched that of other Bisbee photos by Frasher. Chances are very good that the photo was created in the 1940's when Frasher was visiting Bisbee to record other images. To see some of Frasher's Bisbee photos simply go to this link and enter "Bisbee, Arizona" without quote marks:
https://calisphere.org/
To learn more about The Legendary Burton Frasher see:
http://content.ci.pomona.ca.us/index_frasher.php
Actual source of the postcard view used here is:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Bisbee-Arizona-1940s-Continental-Divide-Top-RPPC-Photo-Postcard-Cook-11510/372860831054
Source of the CDT quote is from:
"New Mexico's Continental Divide Trail: The Official Guide" by Bob Julyan
Big Earth Publishing, 2001, 320 pages
https://books.google.com/books?id=Y4QGiYHpozwC
The U.S. Bureau of Public roads 1927 quote about the Mule Pass Continental Divide can be found here:
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/us80.cfm
Map clips were created using:
https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/
Other source links are embedded in the post narrative itself.
For the US 80 Wiki see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_80
Note that on September 21, 2018 the Arizona Transportation Board designated the old alignment of US 80 as a state Historic Road connecting with the designation in California. The Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation led a six year battle to obtain the designation. After the nomination was approved, Project leader Demion Clinco said: "“The designation of this uniquely American historic highway represents years of community advocacy and a long-term commitment of dozens of community groups and stakeholders."
We hope that someday soon, highway US 80 fans will seek to highlight and celebrate was has heretofore been a minor laughing stock atop Mule Pass.
Thank You for reading. John Parsons, Editor.
