Historic Route 66 and Two Guns

Now that we're back in a gas-guzzler, might as well head onto America's most romanticized highway, or what's left of it. There's a lot of back-tracking needed and sudden dead-ends to deal with to stay on that fabled road.

The Twin Arrows attraction is literally just a detour off the highway. A jersey barrier has been constructed between it and the highway, so you can't even pull over and take pictures of the improbable sight of telephone pole sized arrows sticking out of the ground. The barrier hasn't stopped graffiti artists from scrawling anti-Obama slogans across the whitewash of the long-closed gas station that once reaped the benefits of the tourist attraction.

Fortunately Two Guns has a bit more going for it. Our first sign of it is off the highway, KAMP written across the roof of a red building. Near as I can tell it used to be some sort of combination camp-site, gas-station and tourist attraction. Not too far before it on the highway we passed by a stone building still advertising mountain lions after all these years.

There's a few skeletal buildings there when we pull off the highway. A gas station, a train-car or trailer looking building, a brick structure, a large red barn, and a small cinderblock structure that we later discover is next to a drained pool. Twin water-silo looking cylinders have the peeling remains of gunslinger murals that presumably gave the attraction its name. Everything is covered in tags, stencils and obscene drawings. Also, sometimes, bulletholes. I am delighted to find a couple of cartridges amidst the tumbleweeds.

There's still the grills and poles sticking out of the ground here and there. Once perhaps, they marked off the boundaries of different campsites, now all they do is pepper signs of civilization in the yellowed grass.

One of the websites I found, the author recalls having spent a night there in a tent in 1978, and finding it a fenced off ruin twenty years later. The highway we'd just gotten off, I-40 of killed Route 66 by degrees across the southwest for decades before 66 was decommissioned in 1985. With it went the reason for people to visit these quaint roadside attractions.

The ruins extended beyond just the immediate ones around the gutted gas-station. We find a few stone structures and a giant pit. Wonder if these are from further back, if these are ruins from when it was a stopover on an even earlier trail than Route 66. Ghost towns litter this desert. This sort of isolated and extreme life can't be easy, and if the incentive to be there dries up, I'd imagine it would only make sense to pack up quick and not look back.

There were even more ruins over the ridge, but it isn't the only thing on our itinerary for the day, so we too take our leave of Two Guns.