Historic Route 66: Seligman to Kingman

About this drive

Route 66 from Seligman to Kingman, Arizona covers about 87 miles of the original 1920s highway alignment that predates the Interstate by decades — a road that became famous not for its scenery alone but for what it represented to the millions who drove it westward in the 1930s Dust Bowl migration and the post-war road trip era. John Steinbeck called it "the mother road," and the western sections preserved in Arizona are the best surviving stretch. Seligman is where Arizona Route 66 advocacy effectively began — Angel Delgadillo, a barber who opened his shop there in 1950, led the effort to preserve the section after Interstate 40 bypassed it in 1978. The shop is still open. The road between Seligman and Kingman passes through Peach Springs, Truxton, Valentine, and Hackberry — a sequence of settlements that exist almost entirely because the road once passed through them, and which have found their identity in that history. The landscape is high desert plateau: scrub, Joshua trees, and basalt mesas punctuated by the occasional neon-signed motel or diner that has kept its 1950s signage because the nostalgia is now the product. The section from Seligman through to Kingman is the longest uninterrupted stretch of driveable original Route 66 remaining in the United States.

Stops along the way

• 📍 Hackberry General Store · Other

  A roadside store packed with vintage signage and old cars from Route 66's heyday.