Kanin Routson grips his steering wheel and looks out from the ancient railway grade and across the valley. What the founder of Stoic Cider sees is pines, a forest of six-story ponderosa pines in the Bradshaw Mountains. His gray Tacoma vibrates, bounces, and banks with the tight curves of the dust-powdered slopes. He hardly notices as black Angus cattle appear ahead, then trot away. His mind’s eye is on something else, a parcel secreted away in the forest below.

He’s thinking about trees, but not the pines. He’s thinking about gold, but not the precious metal struck here in ages past, drawing a flood-tide of settlers to these wilds near Prescott in the late 19th century. What Kanin seeks is far more fleeting and beautiful: lost apples.

Kanin, who’s 37, drives deeper into the mountains. He tells me about his past academic projects — he has a Ph.D. in apple population genetics — and his current project, a Prescott-area cidery called Stoic Cider. His cidery produces dry, wine-inspired ciders from the wild pre-WWII apple orchards of northern Arizona, from apples harvested from an orchard on his farm, and from alluring apple varieties from the greater American West.

A lineup of past Stoic Cider vintages. Chris Malloy

His wife and Stoic co-owner, Tierney Routson, a 31-year-old biologist with long brown hair and a North Dakota drawl, listens in the back as Kanin speaks.

“This is not an apple-growing area,” Kanin says, his truck now descending, startling mountain bluebirds that dart through the early November sunshine. “I didn’t grow up in an apple culture, per se. Most of these trees don’t produce fruit every year, because we’re in a super-marginal area, and these heritage trees are hardly being cared for at all.”

Kanin parks on the side of the powdery grade. Tierney grabs a Nalgene, puts on a straw hat. The two scientists start hiking downhill through pines, on a mission as immersed in the open world as the one they met on in 2012 — back when they were clipping forage on the Navajo Nation to help extrapolate grazing rates for the tribe and Bureau of Indian Affairs. Kanin twists his tall frame through scratchy brush with ease, with unconscious familiarity, having grown up on a dairy farm to the north encircled by similar woods. Ahead, his lean figure presses through, still lecturing, squinting in wiry glasses against the cool sun. Brambles whip as we squeeze past. The air is sharp and clear out over the treed valley we are entering.

And then, five minutes downhill, like a bolt of lightning illuminating a dark landscape, you realize the orchard has risen around you. Short trees under tall pines. Leaves mostly fallen. A low, broken stone pillar once part of a home. And here, the past of gold rushes and settlers lives on in faint echo — a forgotten orchard in the Bradshaws, half reclaimed by lofty pines, looking like the white ruins of a Greek temple.

Kanin and Tierney peer into the orchard’s first treetops, looking for fruit.

EXPAND Kanin Routson descending to a pine-treed valley in the Bradshaw Mountains. Chris Malloy

At the turn of the 20th century, when the American frontier had recently closed and Arizona was a territory, homesteaders planted apples for jam, sauce, baking, cider, cellaring, and eating fresh off the tree. They planted separate apple varieties tailored to each purpose. They planted so that these varieties would ripen one and then another, bettering their odds of a steady supply. Today, these settlers have passed from the land. But in some places, their orchards remain.

The lost orchard in the Bradshaw Mountains is one of Kanin’s favorites. He and Tierney call it Big Bug Orchard, after its stream. In 2017, Big Bug Orchard produced a bumper crop of ripe fruit. So the Stoic Cider team picked boxes, trucked them 45 minutes north, and made cider.

The idea of an Arizona cidery feels inherently strange. The most popular beverages here are beer, cocktails, and agave-based spirits. Apples and hard cider are more linked in the greater American mind with states like Washington and New York.

Though apples don’t grow in Arizona’s thumbprint landscape, the Sonoran Desert, they have been an important food in northern Arizona’s high desert since before refrigeration, ice, and global supply chains. Homesteaders planted apples because they needed food. They planted them, too, because in order to secure land under the expansion-minded (and ethically suspect, given the indigenous populations) Homestead Acts, homesteaders had to show permanence; raising orchards meant food, yes, but also proof of long-term intentions.

Stoic Cider is at its most vital when entwined with Arizona apples, with land and history.

Big Bug Orchard, for instance, is just one historic orchard Kanin visits, often with one or more fellow Stoic co-founders. It’s just one point in the vast constellation of pre-WWII apple orchards he has checked on in northern Arizona and slightly beyond. Most of these orchards, 43 in all, are “feral,” meaning no longer tended.

Nature being complex, feral orchards arise from many sources other than vanished homesteaders.

“The term ‘feral apple’ could mean a lot of different things,” says New York-based pomologist Gregory Peck, an apple scholar with Cornell University’s Hard Cider Resources program. He points to wild orchards descended from those planted by missionaries, those active in the early, post-contact days of Eusebio Francisco Kino. There’s evidence that indigenous people propagated these apple trees beyond their initial plantings. Their seeds certainly have also been spread by animals, leading to new stands of apple trees. Peck notes that feral orchards can be abandoned commercial orchards, but these are uncommon in the Southwest, where climate has prevented large-scale commercial apple growing.

Kanin and Cody Routson grafting. Stoic Cider / Instagram