Standing at the edge of a small meadow in the Prescott National Forest, I contemplate a small, neglected orchard with Kanin Routson and his wife, Tierney (pictured).
“There’s a ton of places like this in the forest,” Kanin says: tiny, tame islands for which no written record survives. While some settlers proved up homesteads, many simply squatted on the land, building a little cabin near a creek and, almost universally, planting an orchard. And while there might be a pear tree or two, as there are here, settlers mostly planted apple trees. We can speculate on why, Kanin says, but “my guess is that apples had a lot more utility.”
Only the foundation is left of the cabin that once stood here. But the orchard tells a story, if you know how to read it. These are grafted trees with nice architecture, Kanin points out. Somebody cared for them. Because the trunk centers have rotted, it’s impossible to date the trees scientifically. But the varieties and the way the trees were pruned suggest they were planted around 1920.
The number of trees and diversity of apple varieties is typical of homestead orchards, with certain varieties for eating fresh and some for cooking or drying. Almost certainly, there were others for cider — although most cider apple trees didn’t survive Prohibition. Settlers also planted varieties that ripen at different times, so their orchards would produce apples throughout most of the year.
Kanin began his academic career surveying orchards like this one, igniting a fascination with apples that culminated in a doctorate focused on apple tree genetics and the creation of Stoic Cider, which the Routsons founded in 2017. The name honors the resilience of these old orchards — and the grit of the people who planted them.
Stoic’s ciders have playful names, such as Javelina Rosé, which “pairs well with a stubborn personality and a thick skull.” But at the core of the company’s mission is a serious desire to preserve heirloom apple varieties. The Routsons call the project Restoring Apple Diversity, or RAD. And they’re not alone in that mission.
Heirloom apples are showing up at farmers markets in Sedona, in Flagstaff and elsewhere around the country. National Park Service sites, including Pipe Spring National Monument and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona, are restoring orchards to historical conditions. And in Sedona, once famous for fruit, new orchards of heirloom varieties are blossoming.
Interest in heirloom apples has its roots in the renaissance of fermented ciders, the farm-to-table movement and the desire for more complex and interesting foods. But it’s also a question of biodiversity: By some estimates, as many as 16,000 named apple varieties have been grown in North America, but only 11 varieties account for 90 percent of the apples sold in supermarkets, according to a New York Times report.
When apple varieties disappear, so do their genes with all their unique qualities, including disease and pest resistance. There are those who believe that what happened to the potato in 19th century Ireland could happen to the apple, so apple detectives around the country have scoured old orchards, finding varieties thought to be lost and giving them new life.
Kanin grew up reading seed catalogs on his family’s farm north of Prescott. He grafted his first apple tree around age 12, when he figured out that, unlike vegetables, he didn’t have to plant them every year. About that time, Kanin’s childhood idol, Native Seeds/SEARCH co-founder Gary Nabhan, sent graduate students around the Southwest to document old orchards. When they stopped at the farm, Kanin recalls, he understood for the first time that fruit trees had importance beyond bearing fruit.
At Prescott College, Kanin’s undergraduate research involved grafting trees from many of the orchards Nabhan’s students had mapped. About 50 of them ended up in his first orchard on the farm, a living museum of apple history in the Southwest.
Among the collection: a Yellow Bellflower from what likely is the first orchard planted in Sedona, along the West Fork of Oak Creek; a clone of the sole remaining Arkansas Black from Frank Pendley’s first planting at Slide Rock; a Ben Davis from Walnut Creek; a King David from the Cross U Ranch; and, from a nearby homestead, a Wolf River, an apple whose distinction is that a single apple can fill an entire pie.
Kanin planted most of these trees not knowing their varieties. His desire to identify them inspired his graduate studies. It was pioneering work: So little had been done on historic apple genetics that he had to create his own reference library using known varieties in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s apple collection.
His studies eventually led to involvement with orchard restoration efforts at Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park and Arizona’s Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site. He also mapped the orchards at Slide Rock and grafted some heirloom varieties in a small, experimental orchard of his own.
Kanin met Tierney while conducting a rangeland inventory on the Navajo Nation. They spent what they jokingly refer to as their first honeymoon eating their way through the USDA’s apple collection in Geneva, New York. And Stoic Cider became their passion project. Kanin handles most of the production; with a master’s degree in business, Tierney does the marketing and distribution.
The farm’s orchards have expanded with their interests. One is planted in the style of an English bush orchard, with trees trained to grow into a hedgerow. It contains cider apples from Europe and the Southwest, some eating apples and seedlings from five wild species that Kanin hopes might yield trees resistant to drought and heat.
Stoic’s ciders are produced using slow, cool fermentation to bring the fruit forward. Like growing an apple tree, it’s an exercise in patience. The Routsons believe it’s worth the trouble, but as wholesalers, they’ve found it a challenge to convey the message.
“We put so much love and effort and time into this,” Tierney says. “It creates its own little thing out in the world, and we get to see where it goes.”