Route 66 Oatman Highway
— — the old road that still climbs the pass.
Not only on a wall.
“The stretch of old Route 66 that leaves Kingman, climbs Sitgreaves Pass through the Black Mountains, and drops into Oatman on the other side. The road is narrow, switchbacked, and unimproved in places — long bypassed by Interstate 40 to the south. At the top of the pass the desert opens out toward California, and the descent into Oatman is steep enough to make you ride the brakes. The town below was a gold camp in the 1910s, and the burros that once worked the mines still wander the main street as if nothing had changed. from the studio
Route 66 Oatman Highway, on ceramic.
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The place, in three passes.
The Oatman Highway is the surviving alignment of U.S. Route 66 between Kingman and the Colorado River, running roughly 28 miles west through the Black Mountains of Mohave County. The road climbs to 3,550 feet at Sitgreaves Pass before dropping into the old gold-camp town of Oatman and continuing on to Topock at the river. It is the longest continuous original stretch of Route 66 still in regular use, designated an Arizona Historic Road, and was bypassed by Interstate 40 in 1953. The route follows the older National Old Trails Road, an early auto trail completed across this section in 1914.
The road threads a fault-block range of weathered volcanic rock — the Black Mountains — laid down in the mid-Tertiary about 18 million years ago and lifted into their present shape over the last five million. The switchbacks below Sitgreaves Pass cut through dark basalt and tuff, with no guardrails on long sections and grades reaching about eight percent on the western descent. Oatman itself sits in a notch carved out of the same range, surrounded by hills that still hold workings of the Tom Reed and United Eastern mines, which together produced over $40 million in gold between 1908 and 1942.
The drive is open year-round but is best between October and April; summer afternoons in the Mohave run above 105°F and the climb is hard on older vehicles. Most travellers start in Kingman, on the eastern end, and finish at the Colorado River near Topock — about an hour and a half without stops. RVs and trailers are discouraged on the Sitgreaves switchbacks. Oatman draws roughly half a million visitors a year, and the wild burros that wander its single main street are descended from animals turned loose when the mines closed in 1942. They are legally protected under federal law and should not be hand-fed.