Needles: Gateway at the Edge of California

The name comes from the peaks. In eighteen fifty-four, Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple led a government survey across the Mojave hunting a railroad route, and when he reached the jagged spires along the Colorado River he recorded them as The Needles. The peaks stuck on every map that followed.

When the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway pushed construction crews to the Colorado River in eighteen eighty-three, a tent town sprang up at the crossing and inherited the name. Needles was incorporated in nineteen thirteen, but long before that it was the largest river port north of Yuma and an icing stop where fruit and vegetables were loaded for the trip east. In nineteen oh eight the Santa Fe built the El Garces Harvey House here, a gleaming Moorish Revival hotel and depot where Route Sixty-Six travelers would later rest before tackling the Mojave.

Crossing into California at Needles meant you had made it through the hardest stretch of the Mother Road.