Weird & Wonderful
The West runs a deep vein of strange, and it's some of the best of what's out here. Roadside oddities and obsessive monuments, a spring that turns objects to stone, sculptures nobody asked for, places that make you brake hard and ask what happened here. None of it is ironic. The West has always drawn people with a fixed idea and a lot of empty space to pursue it — and then left the results standing by the highway for the rest of us.
CA-1, about 3 miles south of Point Arena1
Glass Beach Drive at Elm Street, off CA-1 in Fort Bragg1
US-21
MT-71
Kelbaker Road (off I-15 / I-40)1
CO-171
SR-171
SR-201
US-20/261
Highway 241
UT-241
I-251
US-301
US-341
SR-381
I-401
I-40 / Historic Route 662
Holbrook
A Santa Fe railroad town once too tough for women and churches, now the seat of Navajo County, gateway to the Petrified Forest, and home to the concrete teepees of the Wigwam Motel.
Winslow
The town an Eagles lyric made famous — and the home of La Posada, the last great railroad hotel and Mary Colter's finest work, at the southern doorway to Hopi and Navajo country.
US-501
US-601
US-60 / SR-2601
Pioneertown Road (off CA-62)1
Historic Route 662
Grand Canyon Caverns
The largest dry cavern in the country, 210 feet under Route 66 — a Cold War fallout shelter, the deepest hotel room in America, and a Hualapai burial place the tourists once mistook for a sideshow.
Hackberry General Store
Looks like a junkyard, is a shrine — the 1934 store an artist brought back from the dead, and the Route 66 stop that inspired Fillmore in Cars.
Historic Route 66 (Foothill Blvd.)1
Historic Route 66 (Mt. Vernon Ave.)1
Historic Route 66 (National Trails Highway)1
Historic Route 66 / I-401
Oatman Highway (Historic Route 66)1
US-701
I-761
I-803
SR-801
US-891
US-89 / US-61
US-911
US-933
Jackpot
A casino town made by an Idaho law, a mile inside the Nevada line, that still keeps Idaho's clock.
Perrine Bridge
Four hundred and eighty-six feet of air between deck and river, and the one span in the country you may jump from without asking.
Pioche
The silver camp that, by legend, out-killed the Old West — Boot Hill's boots-on graves, the graft-ridden Million-Dollar Courthouse, and an aerial tramway still slung over Main Street.
I-941
US-956
Beatty
The town that water built and water kept — the Bullfrog boom's lone survivor, now Nevada's gateway to Death Valley, with wild burros wandering Main Street.
Fremont Street
Glitter Gulch — the neon canyon where Las Vegas actually began
Goldfield
Once the largest city in Nevada, now a few hundred souls — the purest boom-and-bust in the West, with a castle courthouse still in use, a grand hotel dark since the war, and a desert full of upended cars.
The Mob Museum
Organized crime, told in the downtown courtroom that first exposed it
The Neon Museum
The Neon Boneyard — where the Strip''s discarded signs are rescued and lit again
Tonopah
The Queen of the Silver Camps — the 1900 strike that saved Nevada, and the one boom town that never became a ghost: a mine you can walk into, a grand hotel, a clown motel, and the darkest skies in America.