THE OTHER ROUTE

“We’re heading out on a road trip, and I’m looking for information about Highway 80. Do you have anything here?” The smiling young woman at Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park has a flash of recognition before doubt clouds her face. Cocking her head slightly, smile still intact, she asks, “You mean Interstate 8?” and gestures toward the busy highway just beyond the park, where cars, trucks and RVs rumble toward the Colorado River.

“Not Interstate 8,” I reply. “I’m wondering about Highway 80.”

“Highway 80?”

“Yeah. It used to run all the way from the Georgia coast to San Diego. Came into Arizona northeast of Douglas, and snaked into Tucson and Phoenix, and went right through Yuma, then over that old bridge to California.” I point in the direction of Yuma’s landmark Ocean-to-Ocean Highway Bridge, just beyond the park. When it opened in 1915, it was the only highway bridge over the Colorado in a 1,200-mile stretch.

“Wow. I never even heard of Highway 80.”
 

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I’m not surprised by her reaction, although you might figure that a bridge with illuminated, 6-foot block letters that spell out “OCEAN-TO-OCEAN HIGHWAY,” glowing gold and shimmering off the Colorado at night, would prompt a Google search or two. But if Route 66, the highway’s legendary counterpart to the north, inspired American literature, hit songs, TV shows and a veritable tchotchke-industrial complex of refrigerator magnets, keychains, shot glasses and thimbles, U.S. Route 80 — colloquially known as Highway 80 — tends to inspire shrugs.

That’s despite the fact that both routes were established in 1926 — and that, at 2,726 miles, U.S. 80 was more than 200 miles longer than Route 66. During some years, more people actually entered California via U.S. 80, which now officially runs only from the Georgia coast to Dallas.

Although it isn’t likely to dislodge Route 66 from the American imagination, U.S. 80 is emerging from decades of obscurity. In 2018, a six-year effort, led by the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation and backed by communities and organizations along the route, culminated in U.S. 80’s designation as a Historic Arizona Road by the Arizona State Transportation Board.

“If you were coming by car through the American Southwest on any road other than Route 66, Highway 80 was how you experienced the region,” says Demion Clinco, the foundation’s CEO and a former state legislator. “The signage, architecture and tourist experiences all promoted a regional identity and conveyed the ideal of the Southwest.

“And what’s really wonderful about [U.S.] 80 in Arizona is that you still have huge segments of continuous alignment. Especially in Southern Arizona, you’re on two-lane blacktop and have this ‘time machine’ sense of what Arizona was like 50 or 60 years ago. Even 100 years ago. It’s honest in a way that you get an authentic experience. There’s nothing hokey or fake along this road. You get true Americana. And you get it for hundreds of miles.”
 

If Mark Twain wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn today, he might skip the raft and the Mississippi River and just put Huck and Jim in a flatbed Ford and send them out along U.S. 80. Because American roads don’t get more American than this.

Established as part of the national highway system that grew out of the Good Roads movement, which promoted improved highways and automobile touring in the first decades of the 1900s, U.S. 80 was the country’s first all-weather coast-to-coast route. It wasn’t built from scratch, but threaded together from existing roadways, many of them just dirt tracks. In its early days, only about 30 percent of U.S. 80 was paved.

Running through eight states, U.S. 80, either in its entirety or in sections, has been known by different names, including the Jefferson Davis National Highway, the Dixie Overland Highway, the Old Spanish Trail and the Broadway of America. The multiple monikers reflect the fact that the road connects not only the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but also major currents of American history. The Old South and the Old West. The evolution of transportation from stagecoaches to automobiles. And the Civil War and the civil rights movement: The Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the landmark Selma, Alabama, voting rights protest that came to be known as Bloody Sunday after an infamous attack on protestors, is on U.S. 80.

There’s pop culture history, too. Outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow met their demise in a 1934 Louisiana ambush after being spotted driving on U.S. 80. Closer to home, cowboy actor Tom Mix rode into the sunset one last time when he overturned his yellow 1937 Cord 812 Phaeton, complete with hand-tooled leather stone guards on the rear fender, after crashing on a detour around a washed-out bridge in an arroyo southeast of Florence.
 

If John Steinbeck immortalized Route 66 in The Grapes of Wrath, photographer Dorothea Lange, whom art critic Peter Schjeldahl called “the premier photographer of the human drama of the Great Depression,” captured U.S. 80. She turned her focus to migrants heading through Yuma while photographing for the Farm Security Administration.

The last obstacle on U.S. 80 before the promised land of California, the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway Bridge became a major landmark for Dust Bowl refugees. Lange portrayed migrants in rickety vehicles undergoing inspections as they crossed from Arizona, as well as farmworkers boiling sacks of cotton to kill pests before being allowed to continue into California.

Law enforcement from that state turned back many migrants, especially the most desperate. According to a 1935 account in Collier’s magazine, a “half-collapsed” driver crossed the bridge with his family in a “rolling wreck that screamed from every hinge, bearing and coupling,” only to be told there was no point in going farther, because California’s relief rolls were already full.

“And the forlorn man on the moaning car looked at him, dull, emotionless, incredibly weary, and said: ‘So? Well, you ought to see what they got where I come from.’ And he drove right on, fearful, perhaps, that once stopped, his car would never start again.”

My wife, Becky, and I briefly head onto Penitentiary Avenue to cross the bridge. There’s only one lane, so we wait at the light before slowly rolling across the river to California and the land of the Fort Yuma-Quechan Indian Tribe, where a pair of cylindrical water tanks and the far more graceful bell tower of the 1922 St. Thomas Yuma Indian Mission command a low, rocky rise.

Back in Yuma, we ease through town along the old alignment of U.S. 80, passing landmarks large (the art deco Hotel San Carlos, with its three neon spires rising above the parapet) and small (Brownie’s Café, built around 1930 and operated as a diner since 1946).

After joining I-8 for a time, we return to U.S. 80 at Telegraph Pass, where blooming brittlebush plays off the dark metamorphic rock, and drop into the Mohawk Valley. State Senator Lisa Otondo of Yuma, who became active in winning the highway’s historic designation, knows this stretch well.

“There are beautiful panoramic views of the desert, like when you look over and see Castle Dome,” she says. “That mountain formation is gorgeous, and my dad always used to say that when you come over Telegraph Pass and into Wellton and the Mohawk Valley, there was no more beautiful place in the world. It really is. But, yeah, I’m a Yuma girl.”
 

Otondo has deep Arizona roots. Her Basque grandfather, who arrived in 1912, herded sheep up from Sedona and through Oak Creek Canyon into Schultz Pass near Flagstaff, while her father, a pilot during the Korean War, farmed alfalfa, wheat and cotton after the state opened the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation and Drainage District.

“Highway 80 is a road that I traveled my entire life,” she says. “I remember the five kids getting in a station wagon with Mom and Dad and going to visit my grandmother’s farm in Glendale. My aunt lived in Buckeye, where my father also used to farm. The highway was our lifeline; it was what we traveled on. I would sit in the back with the suitcases and play auto bingo and look at the Space Age Lodge in Gila Bend. I always wanted to stay there.”

Otondo supported U.S. 80’s historic designation not just for the economic benefits that could come through better promotion of the road’s rural communities, but also because of less tangible reasons.

“We’re all moving so quickly into the future,” she says. “But then you get to Gila Bend and see a neon sign on the old Stout’s Hotel that advertises refrigeration and steam heat. It gives you a better idea of how people used to live and what they went through. How difficult things sometimes were.”

Narrower and bumpier, U.S. 80 doesn’t numb you into interstate autopilot mode. There’s much more to see: abandoned gas stations; citrus groves, with the tops of trees leveled off for easier harvesting; and stands of palm trees, both living and dead. You can smell the drive, too, as the sun warms rows of vegetables and ripens the aroma of the 120,000-head-capacity McElhaney Feedyard.

After checking out Stout’s Hotel, once dubbed “The Jewel of the Desert” and touted as the only air-conditioned hotel between Tucson and California, we zip north out of Gila Bend as U.S. 80 breaks free of its east-west orientation.

The 40-mile drive to Buckeye is Arizona desert eclectic incarnate, with the randomness we crave on road trips. We pass the Desert Sweet Shrimp aquaculture facility, a residential community built along a pair of water-skiing lakes, cattle and dairy operations, and acres of photovoltaic panels and alfalfa fields. But the highlight is the 1,700-foot-long Gillespie Dam Bridge.

Tempe’s poured concrete 1931 Mill Avenue Bridge, with its 10-span open spandrel design along the Salt River, has an Old World grandeur. But if the Gillespie Dam Bridge lacks comparable romance, the nine-span truss bridge across the tamarisk-choked Gila River reminds me of the Erector Sets I played with as a kid. With Becky behind the wheel, I’m able to take in the full effect as we drive within the web of interlocking oxidized girders. Seen at 25 mph against the blue desert sky, the girders and beams almost seem to animate, opening and closing as if we’re passing through a kaleidoscope.
 

By the time we get to Phoenix, the metropolitan area is a shock after miles of open desert. Facing a veritable urban Iditarod across the Valley of the Sun, we decide to focus on an 11-mile section of the old highway along Mesa’s Main Street. Mixed in among the mini-malls are relics of U.S. 80’s heyday, some from as far back as the 1930s and with neon signs that could make a devotee of Route 66 swoon.

For all of its geographical and cultural incongruity, the headdress-wearing Plains Indian advertising the Kiva Lodge Motel is a classic. So, too, is the Starlite Motel’s “Diving Lady,” a 70-foot-tall animated sign knocked to the ground during a 2010 windstorm. After a restoration by the Mesa Preservation Foundation, the lady dives again, six times per minute. From pike position to full extension and a virtually splash-free entry, she nails it every time.

“There’s this sort of organic discovery as you go on Highway 80,” says Clinco, of the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation. “Diners and artifacts of a different age that are intact and still along the road.”

The challenge is saving them. Tucson has its own rich storehouse of vintage neon along Miracle Mile. But the neighborhood had gone into a steep decline, and many of the signs had deteriorated to, in Clinco’s words, “fragmented, rusted artifacts” by the time he joined the foundation.

The group decided a neon sign restoration project could have a big impact at a low cost. “I thought they would be easy to restore,” Clinco says. “How hard could it be? You have a sign [and] take it to a repair place, and a week later, out pops a working neon sign.”

But to save the neon, ordinances from the 1980s had to be redrafted to create a sign code for historic landmarks. And, as it turned out, each of the four signs that the foundation planned to restore required up to five months to fix. The total cost was almost $150,000.

Now installed on the Pima Community College campus, the signs figure prominently in city marketing materials, Clinco says — a marked shift in attitude from what he first encountered. “I had been surprised that there was any debate about whether we should preserve these iconic downtown historic resources,” he says. “It’s amazing that within a generation, we can forget the things that defined us as a community.”
 

After a stretch of Interstate 10, we rejoin U.S. 80 in Benson, passing one of my favorites — the closed Benson Bowling Alley, with its Mimbres-style graphics that include a fluteless Kokopelli in mid-backswing — before rolling by the 1936 Horseshoe Café. The pies are baked daily, and you can keep the iPhone holstered and cue up George Jones, Bob Wills and Gene Pitney on the in-booth jukeboxes. A quarter gets you three songs.

Past a stretch of local businesses — Hangman Tattoo, Sarge’s Sidearms and Zearing’s Mercantile — U.S. 80 rounds a bend, bound for Tombstone and Bisbee. In St. David, mesquite trees crowd the highway before the view opens up. At dusk, the sun fires the crags of Cochise Stronghold to the east, while across the San Pedro Valley, the snows atop the Huachuca Mountains glow pink with the fading light.

Approaching Bisbee, we skip the Mule Pass Tunnel, which opened in 1958 and is among Arizona’s longest highway tunnels, to follow Old Divide Road, the original highway route over the Mule Mountains. The road’s name comes from the fact that in 1914, the range was erroneously identified as a point on the Continental Divide — a miscalculation of around 100 miles. But who’s counting? An obelisk still proclaims this geographical misnomer and marks the non-landmark’s 6,030-foot elevation.

It’s getting dark as we navigate the road’s twisting, dropping course into Tombstone Canyon and the heart of Bisbee. In the morning, we walk over to Bisbee’s historic Lowell neighborhood, once a separate town where U.S. 80 ran for a few blocks through a busy commercial area that served what The WPA Guide to Arizona described in 1940 as a diverse community of Finns, Montenegrins and Serbians. Even then, the expansion of the Lavender Pit Mine had created ground instability that led to the demolition or abandonment of many homes. What survives of Lowell’s downtown is poised along the abyss.
 

We’re here for huevos rancheros at the Bisbee Breakfast Club on Erie Street, truly an eerie street where I feel as though I’ve slipped through a wrinkle in the space-time continuum and splashed down in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration. Somewhere between art installation, movie set and ghost town, with a bit of junkyard randomness thrown in, the streetscape is the loose collaboration of a group of volunteers dubbed the Lowell Americana Project.

A painted Indian Motorcycle logo (another Plains Indian) adorns a brick building, while a neon sign, cantilevered out from a storefront, touts “Pool Snooker Joker Pool Libations.” We pass old Texaco gas pumps and a host of vintage vehicles: a green Ford F100 pickup (maybe 1956), a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a Greyhound Scenicruiser bus. For a soundtrack, a guy is playing Isn’t It Romantic? on an upright piano rolled out onto the sidewalk.

From Lowell, we spin through the roundabout on the edge of town and pass stands of ocotillos and the towering stalks of soaptree yuccas along the 21 miles between Bisbee and Douglas. After paying our respects at the Gadsden Hotel in Douglas, we head out on the final stretch to New Mexico. Wildflowers splash across the open ranch country of the San Bernardino Valley, with the Chiricahua Mountains rising to the northeast. Old concrete bridges span arroyos, and beyond the turnoff for Skeleton Canyon, where Geronimo formally surrendered to U.S. forces in 1886, we pass an old stone building from the 1930s before pulling over at the Geronimo Surrender Monument, a stone tower erected in 1934 as part of the New Deal’s Civil Works Administration.

Reading the plaque’s anachronistic description of how American troops “risked their lives to enter the camp of the hostiles” to end the Indian Wars, it’s remarkable to realize that U.S. 80 and the monument date to a time much closer to the era of Geronimo than to our own. Looking across the grasslands to the distant mountains, not much seems to have changed since Geronimo’s surrender. Then, the silence of nowhere is briefly broken by the sudden rush of a passing pickup truck, the first vehicle we’ve seen since leaving Douglas 40 miles back, before U.S. 80 is quiet again.