Saturday, September 01, 2012

Good Advice

 Kingman, Arizona

A preserved section of "Old Route 66" runs from Kingman to the vicinity of Needles, California. It's desert here, but clearly subject to flash flooding. I'd encountered several other sections of Old 66 earlier on the trip, at Weatherford, Oklahoma and a couple other places where the old section not paved over by Interstate was a typical four-lane secondary highway probably dating from the fifties. But out here it was the real deal, original route with a narrow two-lane paved surface.

near Kingman, Arizona

The road passes through a stark, beautiful landscape. In places the hairpin turns are carved out of the hillsides and such tight radius that many call for second gear, some even first. At least there are frequent spots wide enough to pull off the road and try for pictures. The earth and rocks too had a reddish color, strange to eastern eyes and also quite a different hue from the reddish earth I'd seen in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

2 comments:

Don and Sher said...

Man this last week you have had some very interesting shots, nice work.

Carl Weese said...

Thanks, Don. The main goal of the Giant Road Trip of course was to photograph the drive-in theaters, but I was determined to do other work as well, partly to stay fresh. Doing nothing but the theaters might make my head explode. Covering over 12,000 miles of American road, most of it not on the Interstates, you sure do see a lot of things worth making into pictures.