Historic Route 66
Arizona's stretch of the Mother Road — the longest preserved run of Route 66 in the country, from the ponderosa high country down through Seligman and Kingman to the Oatman switchbacks and the Colorado River.
The Route at a Glance
Route 66 was never a road so much as a stitching-together — in 1926 the new federal highway system tied a set of existing local roads into a single line from Chicago to Santa Monica, and the Mother Road carried a century of migrants, tourists, and Dust Bowl families west across the country. Arizona holds more of the original than any other state: some three hundred eighty miles of it, and the single longest unbroken stretch of the old alignment left anywhere, the hundred and sixty miles from Seligman to Kingman that the interstate never managed to erase.
That stretch survives because a barber refused to let it die. When Interstate 40 bypassed Seligman in 1978, Angel Delgadillo organized the towns the new road had stranded, and in 1987 Arizona named the run Historic Route 66. The kitsch that followed — the neon, the burros, the roadside museums — is real history now, and in 2026 the whole thing turns a hundred.
Driven east to west, the Arizona road begins near Lupton on the edge of the Painted Desert and runs through the railroad towns strung along the old Santa Fe line: Holbrook, with its concrete Wigwam Motel; Winslow, where a corner and an Eagles lyric became a shrine; Flagstaff in its ponderosa; and Williams, the last town on the whole route to lose its traffic to the interstate, in 1984, and still the depot for the Grand Canyon Railway. Past Ash Fork the old road peels away from I-40 and runs free again — Seligman, the Grand Canyon Caverns, Peach Springs at the heart of the Hualapai reservation, the leaning shelves of the Hackberry General Store, and into Kingman, the route's western hub.
Then it saves the best for last. West of Kingman the Oatman road climbs the Black Mountains in cliff-edge switchbacks over Sitgreaves Pass — the kind of grade the interstate was invented to avoid — and drops into Oatman, a played-out gold camp now run by wild burros, before falling to the Colorado at Topock. Drive it slow. The point was never to get anywhere fast.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
9 stops along the route, in driving order from Lupton (New Mexico line) to Topock (Colorado River).
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A Story Along This Route
Go deeper into the history and character of this drive.
That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let Historic Route 66 do what it does best.
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