Pinedale, AZ

Pinedale is an unincorporated Navajo County community up around 6,500 feet on the Mogollon Rim, southwest of Snowflake and Taylor. The name has changed along with the settlement’s work: early families called it Mortensen, and for a time it was also known as Percheron after James Mortensen’s horses. By the late 1880s, Pinedale was the name that stuck.

ATTRStuart Bechman / CC BY-SA 4.0

The Petersen and Mortensen families established a Mormon settlement here in 1879, along Mortensen Wash, while people from Snowflake used the surrounding pine forest for lumber. That timber helped build homes in Taylor and Snowflake and made the community part of a wider east-central Arizona settlement network. The old Verde Trail, General Crook’s military route between Fort Apache and Camp Verde, also crossed this country. Navajo County’s larger pattern still fits the place: timber, ranching, and high-country roads matter more than a formal town center. Pinedale makes the most sense as a small rim community with a layered name history and a working connection to the forests around it.