Logging, sheep-herding, and mining were Flagstaff’s industries, all driven by the railroad’s arrival. Now, the growth industry is tourism--and some wish the railroad would depart permanently. Al Richmond is a railroad historian at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

"We get eighty trains a day through town," Richmond comments. "You can tell the engineers who have had trouble at the crossings, because they really pull on that horn."

The trains divide Flagstaff in two, as they do in many western cities. When the Amtrack pulls in, for thirty minutes the town has an iron curtain across the tracks. Traffic stops in a gridlock.

"Some people say we should move the tracks on the other side of the interstate--it would take hundreds of millions of dollars. Some want to sink the tracks below the crossings. Something has to be done."

Flagstaff was a lumber town. Here travelers to this highest city on 66 erected a flagpole made of a tall, thin Ponderosa. The best thing that ever happened to Flagstaff was the arrival of Arizona Normal School, now Northern Arizona University with roughly 20,000 students and l,000 faculty. The university takes seriously its Colorado Plateau location, and Gary Nabhan, the distinguished environmental writer, works with an institute here. When you add the city and county payroll to the university’s, and throw in the tourist dollars at the hundred motels and restaurants, you have a prosperous, if at times monochromatic, community cut into the Northern Arizona pine forests.