Really, really old civilization

1933 bridge, closed to traffic. This "camelback arch" could handle the Rio Puerco's notorious flooding.

If you are planning a Route 66 trip and want to do any side trips, you need to build them into your itinerary in advance. What looks like “only” 30 miles—or 30 minutes!—out of your way when you’re sitting looking at the map at home, could take an entire day or else not be worth doing. We planned not to miss a mile of the Route (given the various alignments already discussed), but there were certain national parks which, while not “on the way,” were as close to Route 66 as we were ever likely to pass on a road trip. Therefore, I planned a three-day detour from Gallup, New Mexico, a giant loop that would then rejoin the Route at Gallup.

 

To get there, we left Albuquerque via post-1937 Route 66. Central Avenue has “rapid transit” platforms running down the middle of it, and the use of buses to play the role that probably should be played by a subway reminded me of Lima, Peru. A faded RV park sign hopefully advertised “Paradise Acres.” 

The city petered out up on “Nine Mile Hill,” and then the frontage road led to a dead end on Laguna land, so we had to get on I-40 again. Outside the Laguna Pueblo is the ghost of Budville, whose Trading Co. dates from 1928.

Much of that day we were traveling on the Laguna and Acoma Pueblos. Many people assume that unlike Europe, North America doesn’t have really old cities or buildings, but the Acoma “Sky City” is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in what is now the U.S., dating to A.D. 1150! A tumultuous period in Acoma history was Spanish rule; several of the colonial mission churches are from the 17^th century.

 

The road was lonely across the Acoma Reservation. People mostly live way back from the road, leaving the once-charming town of San Fidel now mostly remnants. The only one that still looked in decent shape was St. Joseph’s Church. 

San Fidel

Whiting Bros., old gas station chain

 

All along western Route 66 we’d become more aware of the railroad, and how continually it’s used (almost all for freight trains).

Often we were following along beside it. Sometimes we would see a building perched high above. And then, in Grants, New Mexico, we could see the tracks running higher than the motel roofs.

Note hiring sign

In 1950, a Navajo shepherd discovered what turned out to be one of the world’s largest uranium reserves in this area (another of the natural resources that suddenly made Indian lands of interest to the government after all). During the Cold War, a lot of uranium was mined, but it all closed down with a recession in 1983. Now, all that’s left is a mining museum, next to a lovely park where we stopped for lunch.

Riverwalk Park

There are still a number of cool neon signs in Grants, plus the Route 66 Neon Drive-Thru (free)!

Further on, at Thoreau, sits one of the oldest remaining service stations on the Route. Originally in Grants, this gas station was moved following the 1937 realignment of Route 66. Roy Herman bought it in 1950, and Herman’s Garage continues to make sales (at least of Coke) to this day.

At last we reached the Continental Divide. At 7,275 feet, this is not the highest point on Route 66, but it does mark where the waters drain on the east side towards the Gulf of Mexico and on the other to the Pacific Ocean. It is also the location of one of the many garish trading posts on this part of the Route, whose billboards we’d been seeing for miles.

Just before Gallup, we took a slight detour (less than a mile) to reach Red Rock State Park. The woman in the museum provided a friendly welcome, the bathrooms were clean, and the views along (part of) the Pyramid Trail were spectacular.

Gallup welcomed us with a profusion of public art. Even the trash receptacles in Gallup have murals on them, and many old motel signs remain.

By Jerry McClanahan, auhor of EZ Route 66

I knew there was a small museum I wanted to see in downtown Gallup. It used to be in the Chamber of Commerce building, which handily has free parking, but the helpful woman there pointed us across the parking lot to the Cultural Center, which is also the Amtrak station. Good thing, too, because it was almost 3:00 and about to close (despite the advertised closing time of 5:00).

Navajo Marine statue, Gallup Cultural Center

Upstairs from the station and café is Gallup’s free museum.

I’d noticed this latest turn of multiculturalism on the way into town, when we spotted what must surely be the only mosque along Route 66. 

Medicine men who blessed the building, 1923

The unmissable part of this was the exhibit about the Navajo Code Talkers. These men, all but one of them Navajo, were recruited into the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II. The idea was that they could use their language as an unbreakable code in the theatre of war. 

Despite having been recognized as U.S. citizens for fewer than 20 years, many indigenous people were proud warriors, and they rose to America’s defense. The museum has a copy of a Navajo Nation resolution, passed unanimously on June 4, 1940, which asserted: “There exists no purer concentration of Americanism than among the First Americans.” Young men, some carrying their rifles or shotguns, lined up to volunteer for the U.S. armed forces. 

My own grandfather served in Guadalcanal, Saipan, and some of those other campaigns. Who knows if his life, or his buddies’ lives, might have been saved by one of the Code Talkers’ messages? I could conceivably owe them my own life.

 

The Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, is famously based on a photograph of Marines raising the American flag after the battle of Iwo Jima. One of the Marines in that picture, who was present at the memorial’s dedication, was Ira Hayes, a member of the Gila River Indian Community located in Maricopa and Pinal Counties, Arizona. Hayes’s life and tragic death are the subject of a song recorded by Johnny Cash; the song says Ira Hayes “forgot the white man’s greed.” I am struck by the fact that after everything they’d gone through, proportional to their percentage of the population, more American Indians fought in defense of the United States than members of any other ethnic group.

The museum has other cool paraphernalia. Note the kitschy book about Christopher “Kit” Carson, of whom statues, including the recently removed one in Santa Fe, were erected due to his reputation as a frontier hero. If you want to know the other side of Carson’s reputation, read Dee Brown’s groundbreaking 1970 book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. (Read it anyway, if you haven’t already.) Here we were, in the same state of New Mexico, with two different sides of the Kit Carson story. 

Lord, this is a complicated country.

 

I think it was that day that it struck me what was different about Route 66’s heyday. Commercialism and branding were rampant in the 1950s and ’60s—not so much “roadside beautification” yet—but everything was different. Each motel sign, each mom-and-pop business tried to be its own unique brand. Whereas today, a motel franchise or the Golden Arches advertise the same experience, no matter which town you’re passing through.

 

As we learned in Gallup, that advertising is not always accurate. While we’d had superior motel experiences at Super 8s before, such as in Clinton, Oklahoma, the one in Gallup was kind of a dump.

Not that we expected to use the pool, but if something’s advertised on your sign and you don’t have it, some kind of explanation might be nice. COVID, I suppose. Did that also account for the “ice available at the office” not being available, or the breakfast, or indeed, for the first hours after we checked in, even a room key?

 

Owner just didn’t care enough to be there. We should never have booked the place, just turned up, seen that it was between two abandoned buildings, and moved on. Plus, when you turn up without a reservation you can ask for a senior (or other) discount. At least the train whistles were evocative. All motels are near the tracks in Gallup.

 

We somewhat relieved our disappointment with margaritas and a “Patti Page Burger” at El Rancho (although T. was perturbed to discover that the burger was a Patti melt!) El Rancho has a gorgeous lobby, a neon “Hotel/Motel” sign, and boasts many, many pictures of celebrities who once stayed there, during the Western movie filming days.

 

Before leaving Gallup for the first time, we did two things. We resolved to stay anywhere but the Super 8 next time, and we had breakfast at Earl’s. 

This restaurant has been run by the Richards family since 1943. We were waited on by the lovely Tyrone, who loved T’s accent (of course) and told us he’d been to London when he was eighteen, probably only a few years ago. When he came to refill our coffee cups, T. said to him, “I was just saying that the right to good coffee must be in the Constitution!”

 

For the first day of our detour, we passed the giant yellow kachina north of I-40, a hay market, and Sandra’s, which said it was open and looked like a bordello! Highway 491 north took us into the Navajo Nation and past some interesting billboards: “Stay Home. Diné [“the people” in Navajo] Lives Matter.” And “Day of Pentecost, Inc.”

I remember during the early days of COVID-19 seeing an interview with a Navajo coroner that could just make you cry. Many indigenous nations were hit very, very hard by the pandemic, as they’ve been by other imported diseases throughout history. As a result, the Navajo Nation remains super strict about COVID control measures, as well as about alcohol (which killed Ira Hayes along with many of his compatriots). When we briefly stopped in a Navajo-staffed casino outside Gallup so T. could have a spin on the roulette wheel, I noticed that no one was drinking (except possibly inside the licensed restaurant). And everywhere, indoors or outdoors, on Navajo land requires the wearing of masks.

 

Towns along the way were very small, but every one welcomed us with a sign. We crossed into another new state. 

Immediately, we noticed another culture change. Colorado’s mask mandate was rescinded in May, and the Doobie Sisters were advertising with a billboard of a VW bus. 

Cortez, Colorado

We could not have had a more perfectly beautiful day at Mesa Verde National Park. I’d feared we might have cold or even snow closures due to the elevation, but the weather was perfect. We drove to a number of lookouts, including Park Point where the fire lookout is. A woman walking downhill from there (very slowly because of a bum knee) was from Kansas, and I enjoyed chatting to her, having just been in her state.

Mesa Verde is unusual among U.S. national parks in preserving, not so much natural beauty (although it has that in spades), but the history of a civilization. Excavation by excavation, the park walked us through the different kinds of dwellings built by the Ancestral Pueblo starting in the year 600 of the Common Era. [C.E. is a nod to the mosque and to the probably Jewish lady who helps us in a few paragraphs.]

All of this buildup was to the spectacular views of the cliff dwellings, some with well over 100 buildings. Sometime after 1190 C.E., the Pueblo people moved down from the tops of the mesas.

We had great accommodation in Cortez, Colorado at the Retro Inn. We got a discount for great food across the street, too. Even the sobering plea of a drought-ridden area could not dry out our mood.

Before leaving Cortez, we stopped by the visitors’ center and a very helpful woman offered us paper maps; I assured her I already had an atlas. “As long as you aren’t relying on your phone,” she said. She used to work for people who do the global positioning whatever and, she said, she would not rely on those maps!