Arizona to California

Arizona continued to overdeliver on Historic 66. If we hadn’t wanted to stop or have a look at anything, Jane the navigation app was happy to have us continue for 85 miles without a turn!

Burma-Shave signs west of Seligman

But of course, we did stop. First in Peach Springs, headquarters of the Hualapai Reservation, whose fish and game ministry is housed in a hundred-year-old cobblestone building. I went in the general store next door which, I was happy to discover on purchasing them, had doughnuts light and fluffy enough to rival any on Route 66.

 

I also saw only our second rainbow sticker in 24 hours, and of the entire trip (the first was in a shop window in Flagstaff). T. commented on how busy the railroad was. She also wondered what will happen to all the gasoline-powered cars when someday electric cars become compulsory. I think she’s underestimating Americans’ capacity to resist compulsion, but I could be wrong.

Truxton

Big tumbleweeds rolled across the road. Towns were so small it was easy to roll right past them too, but I wanted to stop at Hackberry. The general store there is full of vintage Route 66 stuff, and was the base for the late Bob Waldmire, artist of the Route (whose stuff we’d been seeing since Pontiac, Illinois).

Hackberry General Store

Antares

Before we knew it we caught our first sight of the interstate in days. This was the turn Jane had been telling us about, into downtown Kingman.

I remembered seeing signs for Historic Route 66 on previous drives through Kingman, which is why I’d mistakenly thought it had been replaced by I-40. Kingman is a railroad town and I’d known it only as an important place to stop and get gasoline. I’d never noticed historic downtown before.

Restored Hotel Brunswick (1870s)

The Powerhouse contains a visitor center and museum, but it was closed for Veterans Day. The building used to house the Desert Power & Light Company, which provided the power to build Hoover (Boulder) Dam.

We decided to stop for lunch instead. I’d learned by now that diners are really hit and miss with the pink lemonade and Mr. D'z was a miss—tasted like cleanser—but the food was good.

I-40 does follow the post-1952 alignment of Route 66 west of Kingman. But we turned out of downtown on the earlier alignment, to take us across the Sacramento Wash to the historic Back Country Byway. 

 

That morning, still parked at the Historic Route 66 Motel in Seligman, I’d ventured to show something to T. “I know you’re not used to automatic cars,” I said, “but let me show you how to manually change gears in this one.” I then showed her the “paddles” on the steering wheel for shifting up or down, which even I recognize is not an interesting or satisfying way to shift gears. But today’s stretch of old Route 66 was one of the most interesting—the Oatman Highway—and, while I knew T. would want to drive it, it has some pretty steep grades.

Prior to 1952, this was Route 66 across the Black Mountains. Hard to believe today, with warnings signs about not taking an RV and watching out for bighorn sheep and burros in the road. We first stopped at Cool Springs, a 1926 stone store and camp that was abandoned after the 1950s realignment. After being destroyed as a set in a Jean-Claude Van Damme action movie, it was lovingly restored in the twenty-first century.

Then we started up the hairy switchbacks. There was a viewing spot where we pulled over carefully and walked up. 

The burros are here because their ancestors were brought by miners to Oatman when it was a mining camp. They continue to roam freely today, although I wouldn’t join in the feeding of them as they might bite.

We pressed on towards the highest point, Sitgreaves Pass.

 

After the summit, the curves led down to Oatman.

The name comes from Olive Oatman, a young girl who was captured and possibly sold (the legend, and the tribe, depend on who’s telling the story). She certainly ended up with a tattoo on her chin, like Mojave women, and was ultimately bought back in a trade with fort authorities. Oatman was never a town and today it’s a literal tourist trap, as you can get stuck on the main street between burros and gunfights for show. There was plenty here to entertain while we walked around and rested T’s braking foot.

Following the 1952 realignment, people didn’t have to drive the tight curves of the Oatman Highway anymore, and hardly anyone was left here until the revival of Historic Route 66. But from 1908 to 1915, Oatman was a gold rush town, with twenty saloons and mining operations worth $25 million (meanwhile, only 300 people lived in Kingman). World War II demanded metals other than gold so the U.S. government shifted mining priorities from 1941. Some people are still mad about that. 

All along Route 66 are these ghosts of people and ways of life that were once very vibrant. In other cases, Route 66 is a reminder of people and ways of life that continue going along just fine, despite being invisible or ignored from the outside mass-media world.

Eventually, the Oatman-Topock Highway took us to water! We stopped for a glimpse of the Colorado River before crossing it into the final state of our journey.

Just before we got to California, we saw a blur of speed cross the road. “That’s a roadrunner,” I said, imitating the cartoon sound. T. had never seen one. Of course it was too fast to get a picture of, so here's a motel sign from Tucumcari, NM instead.

At the state line, everyone has to join the interstate go through California’s agriculture inspection, not that anyone looked in our car. We then turned off once again onto the U.S. highway, which became Broadway into Needles.

Needles's former Masonic temple is now a theatre and was welcoming the class of 1961 to its reunion.

Needles also has a former Harvey House (the El Garces, built by Frances Wilson and now closed) and probably other features, but we were preoccupied with finding a motel. Ideally I wanted to do laundry, as we had plenty of time, but everywhere we went either didn’t have laundry facilities or said they didn’t (advertised that they did, but the machines were locked up or all said “out of order” on them). I think this was to do with California’s longstanding drought but it might have been blamed on COVID/social distancing; who knows? No explanations were offered. One motel we left because the guy tried to get T. to give him her PIN, since he also couldn’t bring the card reader over to the plate glass window (despite which he also refused to lower his mask). And, of course, gas had doubled in price. We were already finding California hard work.

Charles Schulz once lived and created the character of Spike in Needles.

Finally, we agreed not to do laundry and go back to the Motel 6, which had welcomed us in a friendly manner and was a short walk from a Chinese restaurant.

We passed a peaceful night, other than the people next door getting up at 5:30 A.M.—to party, not to leave. There was a pot dispensary next door so maybe that had something to do with it. When we checked out, the proprietor apologized to me; he and his wife were personally cleaning the rooms. I had not, in fact, slept badly--being a tour director is exhausting! Where to stay, when to do laundry, which alignment to take, which places of interest to stop. Mostly fun, of course, and it had all gone remarkably well.

 

Just past the Chinese place was the Wagon Wheel restaurant, with menus illustrated by Bob Waldmire. We stopped for breakfast. There was a poster advertising your friendly neighborhood “coffee with a cop.” T. said “the cops won’t be impressed with this coffee!”

Billboards advertised an “Indian & Mexican Restaurant” and, in a sign of the valley agriculture that used Needles as an icing station, “Fresh Pistachios.” Forgetting to stop for gas, we began our crossing of the Mojave Desert.

Pre-1931 Route 66 took us to the ghost town of Goffs. Needles residents used to go to this elevation to escape the heat, until the Route was realigned.

Ghost town

It’s not, thank goodness, that we were close to running out of gas. It’s that what looked expensive in Needles looked positively cheap by Fenner! But we had to stop there, as there is nowhere else for 55 miles. In the nineteenth century and railroad days, Fenner was a popular watering stop, which is more or less how the Hi Desert Oasis still functions today.

 

Pre-1931 Route 66 is to be preferred here, as it avoids I-40 (which also climbs a steep grade through the South Pass of the Sacramento Mountains). Unfortunately, we could not take the pre-'31 Route to Cadiz Summit, so we had to take the Kelbaker Road detour described in Jerry McClanahan’s EZ66 Guide. I mention this detail because McClanahan estimated the road (closed due to washouts) would reopen in 2016-17, but instead, it’s remained closed for six years and counting. We could have backtracked to Cadiz from the west—it was signed only “no through road”—but instead, we pressed on to Amboy. Amboy is the first of a number of towns that were named alphabetically from west to east (Cadiz, Fenner, Goffs). There is not much left of any of them today—the school at Amboy appeared to be closed, though there is a post office. From miles away, one can see the Amboy Crater. It’s only six thousand years old, but at least it was free to view.

Amboy Crater with train in foreground

The star of Amboy is Roy’s Motel & Café, from 1938 the only travelers’ stop for miles. A businessman bought the whole town and today, while the motel is no longer operating, you can go in and buy gas, etc. As would become a trend in California, the plumbing wasn’t up for visitors and we had to use portable toilets.

The water problem, the failure to repair roads (California has, I understand, been broke for a while now), the obvious fact that, while the climate crisis still seems abstract to some people in other places, it’s already arrived here. All of it added up to a very poor impression of Route 66’s eighth and final state. Is this the future, born of those golden years of mining and burning through fossil fuels like there was no tomorrow? (The irony of being on a nostalgic road trip is not lost on me.)

The iconic Roy’s sign is in the mid-century Googie style, a futuristic design inspired by the Space Age. But in The Grapes of Wrath, written earlier, John Steinbeck described the Dust Bowl travelers’ disappointment when they finally reached the promised land of California. Was this it? 

 

Route 66 in Amboy actually goes through the Mojave Trails National Monument. As we learned in the last U.S. administration, national monuments can come and go at the stroke of a president’s pen. Not so national parks, and the side trip on our itinerary here was to Joshua Tree, which we reached by turning south on the desert Amboy Road and driving 42 miles to Twentynine Palms.

 

Joshua Tree National Park was the first crowded place we’d been on our entire trip, Chicago included. It was outdoors, at least, and I guess November must be high season, since in summer the desert gets too hot. Los Angeles residents can reach the park’s southern entrance via I-10 to Palm Springs, but most of them appeared to be where we were, at the western entrance in the town of Joshua Tree. There was a line for the portable toilets at the visitors’ center—no water again—and a long wait to actually enter the park, which was also priced 50% higher than the other national parks.

Once we finally got in, it was a perfect day for exploring. The weather was a nice temperature, ranging down to the 60s Fahrenheit depending on elevation.

We took the popular Hidden Valley hiking trail. Hidden Valley was formed when someone blasted through the rocks to reveal a kind of meadow micro-habitat. It’s also popular with rock climbers, some of whom, including a young boy, we saw roped up high on the boulders.

From Keys View (5,000 feet) you can see as far as Palm Springs. Everyone else was there, too.

We didn’t hike far, but at least I’d gotten my boots dusty on a proper trail. After the obligatory photo op at Skull Rock, 

we made our way down to the cholla cactus garden.

In one of the parking lots we saw a wedding party emerge. The bride smiled for photographs, heedless of the dust, and we waved congratulations. “I have seen everything now,” T. said.

The changing light on the landscape of Joshua Tree was truly special. By sunset we were at the High Desert Motel, waiting for nightfall. From there I could not see as many stars as we had in Seligman, Arizona. But at least this place let me use the washing machine!

At least you can see the moon...