Peach Springs

Read Peach Springs as a tribal capital first, because it is one, and the highway is the newer thing. This is the seat of government of the Hualapai — a name that renders roughly as the People of the Tall Pines — who have lived along this rim of the Grand Canyon for well over a thousand years. Their reservation, a little under a million acres, runs north across the plateau to a hundred and eight miles of the Colorado River, which forms its border at the bottom of the Canyon.

The town's two names carry its two histories. Peach Springs is the settler name, for the peach trees that once grew at the springs here; the water is why the wagon road, then the railroad, then Route 66 all came through. The Hualapai history is harder. An 1883 executive order fixed the reservation at a fraction of the country the people had ranged across, and for decades the Santa Fe Pacific Railroad claimed much of even that outright. The tribe fought the claim for years and won it at the Supreme Court in 1941, which affirmed that the Hualapai held title to their own land — a rare victory in a century that mostly ran the other way. They had already written a constitution in 1938 and made Peach Springs their capital; the 1917 trading post on the highway is now the tribal administration building.

Today the tribe runs the canyon on its own terms. Grand Canyon West and its glass Skywalk, out on the reservation's northern edge, are Hualapai enterprises, and the only public road to the Colorado's floor inside the Grand Canyon — Diamond Creek Road — runs through here. Pixar is often said to have drawn on Peach Springs for Radiator Springs in Cars, which flatters the roadside charm and misses the place entirely: this is the working seat of a sovereign nation, not a piece of nostalgia.

Peach Springs sits at about 4,800 feet, roughly midway on the free-running old road between the Grand Canyon Caverns to the east and the Hackberry General Store to the west, on the long run toward Kingman. Approach it as a community, not a photo stop.