SELIGMAN — On November 11, 1926, the federal highway system handed a number to a patchwork of paved and graded roads running from Chicago to Los Angeles, and U.S. Route 66 was born. A century later, the Mother Road turns 100 — and Arizona kept more of it than any other state.
Roughly 380 miles of original Route 66 still cross Arizona, from the New Mexico line near Lupton to the Colorado River at Topock. Within that run sits the longest unbroken stretch of the original highway left anywhere in the country — about 160 miles of two-lane blacktop from Seligman west to Kingman that the interstate never managed to erase.
That stretch survives because a barber refused to let it die. When Interstate 40 bypassed Seligman in 1978, town barber Angel Delgadillo and a coalition of Route 66 business owners fought back. In 1987 the state named the Seligman-to-Kingman road an Arizona Historic Road — the first "Historic Route 66" designation anywhere — and the preservation movement that spread to all eight Route 66 states started right here. Arizona has since declared Seligman, by legislative decree, the "Birthplace of Historic Route 66."
Driving it west from Seligman, today's old road — signed AZ-66 — rolls through some of the emptiest, prettiest high-desert country in the state: Peach Springs, the seat of the Hualapai Nation; the turnoff for Grand Canyon Caverns, a roadside stop since the 1920s; the cluttered Hackberry General Store; and the small towns of Valentine and Truxton before the road climbs into Kingman, home of the Arizona Route 66 Museum at the Powerhouse Visitor Center.
East of Seligman, the road climbs into the pines. Williams was the last town on the whole route to lose its traffic to the interstate, holding out until October 13, 1984 — which is why its main street survives as one unbroken, neon-lit historic district. It is also the depot for the Grand Canyon Railway, which has run from the 1908 Williams station to the South Rim since 1989. Farther east lie Flagstaff, at nearly 7,000 feet; Winslow, with its Standin' on the Corner park and the 1930 Fred Harvey hotel La Posada; and Holbrook, whose Wigwam Motel village of concrete teepees has been on the National Register of Historic Places since the 1980s.
Got more time? West of Kingman, the original road climbs the Black Mountains in cliff-edge switchbacks over Sitgreaves Pass into Oatman, a played-out gold camp now shared with roaming wild burros, before falling to the Colorado at Topock.
It is, in the truest sense, a long way home — 380 miles of the Mother Road to drive slow. The point was never to get anywhere fast.
