Flagstaff: The High Desert Crossroads

Flagstaff sits at seven thousand feet, among the highest elevations on Route Sixty-Six's entire path from Chicago to Los Angeles. The elevation is why there is a city here: the ponderosa pine forest at this altitude was the resource that made logging possible and profitable in the eighteen eighties, and the railroad came to move the timber. The lumber industry that built Flagstaff is largely gone.

The forest is still there, though changed by a century of fire suppression and selective harvest that altered its structure in ways that now make catastrophic wildfire more likely rather than less. Humphreys Peak, the highest point in Arizona at twelve thousand six hundred thirty feet, is visible north of town as a volcanic cone above the treeline. The San Francisco Peaks, the whole volcanic cluster, are sacred to the Navajo, the Hopi, the Havasupai, the Zuni, and several other nations.

The Hopi call them Nuvatukya'ovi. The Navajo call them Dook'o'oosliid, one of their four sacred mountains that define the boundaries of Dinétah, their traditional homeland. A ski resort operates on the slopes.

Its expansion has been contested in federal court by the Navajo and Hopi nations on religious freedom grounds. The courts have ruled against the tribes. The snow machines that make artificial snow use reclaimed wastewater.

This detail has been a particular source of objection from the Navajo, for whom the peaks are a site of ceremonial significance. The Route Sixty-Six alignment through Flagstaff survives as Historic Route Sixty-Six through the center of town. The neon signs on the old motels still work.

The city has preserved them deliberately. It is a genuine small city with a university and an observatory, the Lowell Observatory, where Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in nineteen thirty.