El Rancho Hotel and the Route Sixty-Six Era
Near Gallup, New Mexico
The El Rancho Hotel on Route Sixty-Six in downtown Gallup is one of the most unlikely movie sets in American film history, and it still looks exactly like one. Built in nineteen thirty-seven by R.E. Griffith, whose brother D.W. Griffith was one of the founding directors of Hollywood, the hotel was designed from the beginning as a basecamp for film productions shooting in the red-rock canyon country surrounding Gallup.
The scenery was unbeatable. Red Rock State Park, the mesas along the Rio Puerco, and the sandstone formations near Window Rock gave directors backdrops that could stand in for the American Southwest of any era, and the railhead in town meant cast and crew could arrive with equipment without needing long supply chains. Between the late nineteen thirties and the early nineteen sixties, many films were shot in the Gallup area. The roster of stars who stayed at El Rancho reads like a classic Hollywood marquee: Kirk Douglas, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Ronald Reagan, Errol Flynn, and Lucille Ball all checked in at one point or another. Their signed portraits still cover the lobby walls.
The hotel itself is a monument to Route Sixty-Six mythology. The Mother Road ran directly past the front door. Travelers driving west from Albuquerque through Cubero, Grants, and Milan arrived here footsore and thirsty, and El Rancho, with its rustic facade and its two-story log-and-plank lobby, signaled that they had reached civilization at the edge of the Navajo country.
Route Sixty-Six was decommissioned in nineteen eighty-five when Interstate Forty bypassed the old alignment, but El Rancho survived. It was restored and reopened in the nineteen nineties and remains a working hotel today, one of the best-preserved Route Sixty-Six landmarks still functioning in New Mexico.
