Route 66 Gothic
Abandoned gas pump, somewhere in the Utah desert.
"Out there the light could turn on you, go flat and white and total, and you'd see the wrecks down in the scrub and know every one of them had been somebody's good idea."
-John Bulmer, September 2026
On the road to Oatman, AZ.
"You'd pull off and walk fifty yards from the road and the whole century would fall away behind you, and it was just you and the heat and some ruined thing rusting in the sun that had been waiting a long time for somebody to finally look at it."
-John Bulmer, September 2026
Williams, AZ
Williams, AZ
Willams, AZ
Shrine, Seligman, AZ
This June I drove almost 1,000 miles through the American West, a landscape I love and could explore endlessly. The stretch that stayed with me most was the Arizona run of Route 66, through Williams, Seligman and Oatman. Three towns, and each one met the end of the road in its own way.
Williams, AZ sits high in the pines. It is a town that did not go quietly. It fought the interstate in court and held out longer than any other town on the route. It gave up the fight on Oct. 13, 1984, when I-40 finally opened around town. Somebody had to be the last. Williams was. The trains still leave for the canyon, and the town still lives on the road it lost.
West of there, the pines give way to open desert, and Seligman, AZ rises out of it. For years, some 9,000 cars a day rolled past Angel Delgadillo's barber shop, until Sept. 22, 1978, when I-40 opened just south of town and the traffic stopped. Delgadillo refused to let the road die. In 1987 he helped lead the effort that got Arizona to designate the old road Historic Route 66, the first state to do it. A small-town barber is a big part of why you can still drive it.
Oatman, AZ is where the road turns strange. To get to the dusty main street, you climb into the Black Mountains over Sitgreaves Pass, a thin ribbon of old asphalt with hairpin curves and steep drop-offs. Along the road are the ruins of someone's American dream: old mines, abandoned vans painted as mile markers, and the wrecks of past travelers in the steep scrub. Then the road drops you into a gold mining town that should have died long ago. Wild burros wander Main Street, descendants of the pack animals miners turned loose when the mines gave out. They look at you like you're the one who doesn't belong.
The interstate took the road from all three towns. One survived on the canyon, one brought the highway back, and one is still standing thanks to the burros. I could drive it again tomorrow.
-John Bulmer, September 2026
© 2026 John Bulmer Photography + Media. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction of text, images, or film content without written permission is prohibited
