Apache County, Arizona · near Sanders · APN 207-63-140: Easy to Reach, Easy to Camp, and the Phone Still Works

An Acre You Can Reach on a Friday Night

Cheap land usually comes with a catch, and the catch is almost always the same one: you cannot get there, and once you do, nobody can reach you. That is fine for a certain kind of buyer. It is a dealbreaker for a man with a family and a normal truck.

This one is flat and open, low brush and grasses with nothing to clear, views running south, west, and east and the town lights just off to the north. 4G service holds here, which means the kids can be bored in peace and your wife knows the phone will ring. Power lines run along the southern and eastern edges. Pitch a tent, set up a camper, rockhound the wash country, and drive home Sunday without an ordeal.

Sanders picked up its name from C.W. Sanders, an office engineer with the Santa Fe railroad around 1883, though the railroad called its own siding here Cheto to avoid mixing it up with another Sanders down the line. The town and its train stop carried different names for half a century before the post office finally settled it in 1936.

Two things to be straight about. The access road along the north line is overgrown, so you come in on the two-track off the highway through an unlocked gate, and FEMA maps this ground in Zone A, the hundred-year floodplain, with no base flood elevation set. Neither one stops you camping here or building here. The second one means anything permanent goes up on elevated footings, with a county floodplain permit and flood insurance in the math.

Apache County has been letting people show up and start over for about a hundred and fifty years. This is a cheap way to join them.