Historic Highways
RVing America's Historic Highways: Urban roads and ancient ways
By Jerry (RiverGuy) Brown

US60, 70, 80 red, covered in this article green

Our exploration of historic highways heretofore has mostly covered the open road and a few towns and smaller cities along the way. But I'm also interested in exploring remnants of the old routes in urban areas. Our stay beneath Superstition Mountain near Phoenix provided such an opportunity.

We arrived in the area westbound on what is now US60, but which was originally co-routed with both US70 and US80 from Florence Junction to Phoenix. The old road first passed through Apache Junction, now a well developed suburb of Phoenix, but was probably once little more than a crossroad where gold mining traffic headed up the Apache Trail. Here the highway turned due west toward Mesa, originally about 15 miles away, entering the town on Main Street. Over the years the two suburbs have grown toward each other, completely filling in the open desert. But if you are observant as you drive along Main Street, you can see several classic open court motels and a few diners from the days when all of the east-west traffic in Arizona that wasn't on Route 66 followed this road.
 
It's only a few more miles into the heart of Phoenix, but the closer you get, the less that remains that recalls the old road. Right near the state capitol building, US60 and 70 diverged to the northwest, making a beeline to Wickenburg. We followed old 80, Buckeye Road, now designated State Highway 85, due west. US80 once ran coast to coast, Savannah to San Diego. In the South it was known as the Dixie Overland Highway. Since 1991 it has officially terminated in Dallas. Even so, most of the old road remains in the West and we'll drive a lot of it for this series.

However, I didn't see much of historical interest in industrial western Phoenix or any of the agricultural lands leading into the farming town of Buckeye. There the highway turns south, generally following the Gila River through rather barren desert occasionally broken by low rocky mountains. The riverbed was more like a broad sandy wash, mostly obscured by brushy paloverde and golden tamarisk. It's easy to imagine driving the old highway here.

We reached Gila Bend as darkness fell, so we pulled into the Gila Bend RV Resort; at $9.49 for full hookups, it might be the least expensive RV park in the country. Next morning driving down the main drag on the way out of town I noted several classic court motels and a couple of drive-ins. Except near the Interstate, Gila Bend seems little affected by the passing years.

Here US80 turns west, still generally tracking the river. From what I could tell, old 80 was pretty much overlaid by I8 most of the way to Yuma, although some original roadbed probably survives as frontage road. For me driving an original roadbed is not a mystical experience of itself. If it parallels a modern highway closely, I'll frequently opt for the newer road, especially when towing. That was the plan for this 120 mile stretch. .

About 10 miles west of Gila Bend we took a side trip to Painted Rocks Petroglyph Site, a BLM administered cultural preserve and campground. The main site is a small hill, perhaps no more than 30 feet high, nearly covered with dark rocks ranging in size from pillows to refrigerators. Nearly every rock bore glyphs of one form or another. Some were festooned so heavily that the glyphs ran together like wallpaper patterns. Clearly people have been marking these rocks for a very long time

Displays at the site identified the glyphs as going back to the Hohokam culture, which dates to more than 2000 years ago. In addition I learned that the Southern Historic Trail along the Gila here, dating from that time if not earlier, was a major early American trade route. Juan Bautista de Anza in 1775 passed through here on his colonizing expedition from central Mexico to found the mission settlement of San Francisco. And it came as no surprise to me to find that the Butterfield Overland Stage also followed this well established route to reach the city by the bay. This was indeed a Historic Highway.

Only later when I was reading a pamphlet on the de Anza expedition did I find indications that the original US80 route may also have come by the site. Looking at a modern map, it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what roads it might have followed. Most of the roads close to the river are unpaved, but then many sections of the first routes of the 1926 highway system started out unpaved. It might be fun to explore this at another time, but we still had the California leg of old US80 ahead of us.

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