Needles: Where the Mojave Meets the Colorado

Needles, California, takes its name from a cluster of sharp rock spires visible across the Colorado River from the Arizona side. The Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, later part of the Santa Fe, founded Needles as a railroad town in eighteen eighty-three, and the town grew around the rail yards in one of the most hostile climates in the United States. Summer temperatures regularly exceed one hundred twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Needles has recorded overnight lows as warm as one hundred degrees, among the hottest nights ever measured.

Route Sixty-Six passed through Needles, and the town appears in John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath' as the point where the Joad family first crossed into California and stepped into the Colorado River to cool off. The bridge they crossed carried cars over the river from the nineteen teens. Today Needles is a quiet stop on Interstate Forty, known among birders and river recreationists for its Colorado River access.