Holbrook: Crossroads on the Painted Desert

The Atlantic and Pacific Railroad drove its rails west across the high desert of northern Arizona in the summer of eighteen eighty-one, and when the crews stopped to establish a water and supply point on the banks of the Little Colorado River, they named the place for the man who had helped push the line through. Henry R. Holbrook was a chief engineer of the Atlantic and Pacific, a figure whose name now marks one of the most dramatic crossroads in the American Southwest.

The railroad came first. The town followed within months, a collection of tents and rough board structures growing up around the depot and the cattle pens, in a wide flat basin rimmed by painted hills of red and gray and lavender. Holbrook sits at roughly five thousand one hundred feet above sea level, on the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, where the land stretches in every direction with the particular emptiness that makes this part of Arizona feel like the edge of the world.

To the south the land drops into the White Mountain highlands. To the east and southeast, the Petrified Forest spreads across hundreds of thousands of acres of arid tableland, hiding the fossilized remains of a tropical forest two hundred twenty-five million years old. To the north lies the Painted Desert, whose badlands glow with iron oxides and manganese in colors that shift with the angle of the sun.

Route Sixty-Six, the old highway from Chicago to Los Angeles, ran directly through Holbrook from nineteen twenty-six until it was decommissioned in nineteen eighty-five, and the road brought a different kind of traveler, people heading west with their lives packed into cars, stopping at motor courts and diners and roadside curiosity shops. But before Route Sixty-Six there was the railroad, and before the railroad there was the river, a rough and capricious stream that flooded without warning and ran dry without apology. The Navajo and the Hopi have lived in this region for centuries, and their nations border the town on the north and east.

Holbrook has always been a place where worlds meet. Cowboys and cattle ranchers, railroads and road travelers, Navajo traders and Hopi farmers, travelers passing through on their way somewhere else. The town sits at the center of all of it, a crossroads that has always had more passing through than staying.