Back in the days when Route 66 was the Mother Road, places like Two Guns, Arizona, were the happening stops on the road across America. With Interstate 40 relegating the historic road into the past, many places could not survive the speeding highway that zipped people right by with no need to take a break. Two Guns is now a ghost town.

This is a fragment of Route 66 that allowed people to cross Diablo Canyon.

Some long-unused gas pumps are shells of their former selves. Nearby is the car lift rusting in the outdoors as the garage that was once surrounded by it is gone.

For the longest time, I wondered what “Mountain Lions” referred to, thinking it was the mascot for a nearby high school football team or something. Nope, this was to announce that there was a small zoo at Two Guns, as any old gimmick might work to bring people off the highway. Well, ultimately, it didn’t work because there ain’t nothing left but ruins in this old ghost town.

I might have better framed this shot, except that I was driving about 70 mph when I saw this bizarre cloud pattern in the sky, and I was thinking that by the time I found a safe spot to pull over, the whole thing might not have the same appearance.

Stopping in at Homolovi State Park which was the primary objective of this journey north today. We’d driven by and discounted it as it’s a State Park and not a National Park and so the thinking was it was inferior. I was wrong.

Not only are there ruins of abandoned dwellings, but there is also a wealth of artifacts strewn about, which are allowed to remain where they fell so many hundreds of years ago so that visitors can discover them just as someone else may have who was wondering the landscape. I appreciate the trust and have a deep-seated hope that others can fight the impulse to collect a souvenir, though if how much petrified wood leaves the Petrified Forest National Park further down the road is an indicator, then it’s only a matter of time before these grounds are picked clean.

A foreboding sky can’t adequately hide the expanse of beauty the eye can extract from gazing out on the horizon. I have to wonder, though, if my infatuation with the breadth of this open space is because I don’t have to live here.

Sedimentary layers that, over time, become sandstone tell geologists about the natural history of this land, while the artifacts and remnants of the cultures that lived in the area can fill in another part of the historic timeline that preceded our arrival. Just as a simple observation of the Two Guns ghost town more obviously conveys its history.

As the sun sets in the West, the visual alarm clock reminds me that it’s time to head south to catch up with Caroline and share photos of where my adventure took me today.