Route 66 & the Colorado River
The Mother Road and the water border with California — the longest surviving stretch of Route 66 from Seligman through Kingman to Oatman, the Black Mountains switchbacks, and the Colorado River lakes from Lake Havasu down to Yuma.
Arizona holds the longest surviving stretch of Route 66 in the country — some three hundred eighty miles of the Mother Road, including the single longest uninterrupted run of the original alignment left anywhere, the hundred and sixty miles from Seligman west through Kingman. That the road survived at all is one town's doing. When Interstate 40 bypassed Seligman in 1978 and left it for dead, a barber named Angel Delgadillo organized the businesses still hanging on, and in 1987 Arizona designated the stretch Historic Route 66. The nostalgia trade that followed — the neon, the burros, the Snow Cap Drive-In — grew straight out of that refusal to close. In 2026 the road turns a hundred, and this is where the country comes to drive it.
It saves its best for the western end. Past Kingman the old highway climbs into the Black Mountains on the Oatman road, a set of cliff-edge switchbacks over Sitgreaves Pass no interstate would ever tolerate, and drops into Oatman, a gold camp gone over to wild burros and staged gunfights in the street. The long eastern approach runs through the pine country of the Hualapai, whose land holds the western rim of the Grand Canyon.
Then the road meets the water. The Colorado is the region's western edge and its reason for being — the border with California and Nevada, dammed into a chain of desert lakes. Lake Havasu City imported the actual London Bridge, shipped stone by numbered stone and rebuilt over a dredged channel in 1971. Downriver, Yuma held the crossing everyone bound for California once had to make, and later the territorial prison that gave the town its teeth. This is Yuman and O'odham country too — the Mojave, who call themselves Pipa Aha Macav, the people by the river; the Quechan; the Cocopah. The Mother Road gets the postcards. The river was here first, and it decided everything.
What to See in Route 66 & the Colorado River
6 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Geology & Rock Formations
Towns & Gateways
Roadside Stops
Scenic Drives through Route 66 & the Colorado River
Stories from Route 66 & the Colorado River
Route 66 & the Colorado River rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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