Route Sixty-Six, The Mother Road Through Arizona

Route Sixty-Six crossed Arizona for roughly three hundred eighty-five miles. It was, for most of the highway's active life, the longest and arguably the most dramatic stretch of the entire route, from the California border at Topock, across the Mohave Desert, through Kingman, across high grassland to Williams, then east through Flagstaff, Winslow, Holbrook, and down to the New Mexico line at Lupton.

The highway was designated on November eleventh, nineteen twenty-six, the result of years of lobbying by road boosters who wanted a continuous paved route from Chicago to Los Angeles. It was not fully paved for its entire length until nineteen thirty-seven.

For Dust Bowl refugees fleeing Oklahoma and Texas in the nineteen thirties, Route Sixty-Six was the road west. John Steinbeck called it the Mother Road in The Grapes of Wrath, published in nineteen thirty-nine. Tens of thousands of families drove it in overloaded trucks, most of them headed to California. Many of them broke down in Arizona. Some of them stayed.

The roadside culture that grew up along the Arizona stretch was particular to it: trading posts that sold Navajo blankets and turquoise to motorists; Burma-Shave signs on the Painted Desert stretches; diners in Winslow and Holbrook that had been feeding travelers for decades when the Eagles wrote about standing on a corner in nineteen seventy-two.

When Interstate Forty bypassed most of Route Sixty-Six in the nineteen seventies and eighties, the road's commercial life collapsed. The highway was officially decertified in nineteen eighty-five.

What remained became something else: a historical artifact with nostalgia economics. Arizona has preserved more continuous driveable miles of Route Sixty-Six than any other state.